The Traveling Baker
Fry's Red Wheat Bread, a Victoria based, upstart micro-bakery built around a mobile brick oven and the idea of a single baker working to create a community around great bread.
Traveling baker Byron Fry taught himself to bake 3 years ago before apprenticing at the Italian Bakery in Victoria BC. During the summer of 2010 he rode his motorcycle 16 000km around North America, visiting bakeries in Montreal, New York, North Carolina and Portland. In NC he met the baker Richard Miscovich who inspired him to come home to BC, build an oven, and bake bread. The historical name and logo of Fry's Red Wheat Bread was passed down from his great-grandfather whom owned and operated a bakery in Victoria at the turn of the century.
This is his first year farm-based operation in Metchosin. You will find him at the James Bay Community Market Saturdays 9-3 and the Metchosin Farmers Market 11-2 as well as the Oak Bay Night Market, third Wednesday of the month.
Traveling baker Byron Fry taught himself to bake 3 years ago before apprenticing at the Italian Bakery in Victoria BC. During the summer of 2010 he rode his motorcycle 16 000km around North America, visiting bakeries in Montreal, New York, North Carolina and Portland. In NC he met the baker Richard Miscovich who inspired him to come home to BC, build an oven, and bake bread. The historical name and logo of Fry's Red Wheat Bread was passed down from his great-grandfather whom owned and operated a bakery in Victoria at the turn of the century.
This is his first year farm-based operation in Metchosin. You will find him at the James Bay Community Market Saturdays 9-3 and the Metchosin Farmers Market 11-2 as well as the Oak Bay Night Market, third Wednesday of the month.
This is the oven I’m constructing. It’s a scaled down commercial bread oven with modifications that make it well suited to living upon a trailer. I should be able to pull forth about 150 loaves from a single firing, ideal for my traveling micro-bakery. Photo is taken by William Davenport of Turtlerock Heat, who build this oven and another similar one from his own design. I bought his plans last month and have been gathering my supplies to start building sometime next week. I should be baking by January.
For anyone interested I’ll be profiling the build on this blog over the next months, talking a bit about what it is like to build a brick oven and start a small wholesale bakery.
