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.
In the bad old days of the fourteenth century, when popes ruled from their palace in Avignon, the penalty for making substandard bread was severe. The guilty baker would have most of his clothes removed before being tied up in front of his shop, and then the good people of Avignon were encouraged to hit him with a stick as they passed by. The quality of his bread tended to improve dramatically.
From Confessions of a French Baker by Peter Mayle and Gerard Auzet.