BRIMFIELD BREAD OVEN

scratch made bread & pastry

{organic grains, local ingredients}

coffee. tea. beer. wine. wifi.

Brimfield Bread Oven is a European style bakery in Brimfield Township, Ohio. Everything is made from scratch with simple ingredients, hand-shaped and baked in a stone deck oven.

The bakery began as a cottage foods bakery that we (Jud and Genevieve Smith) began in 2014 using a mobile wood fired oven at our home. After learning that Ohio does not allow cottage food bakeries to use wood fired ovens that are outdoors (ha!), we decided to get a permanent space to build a bigger oven and share our passion with our community.

With determination, luck, the support of everyone who backed our Kickstarter and of course our family and friends, Brimfield Bread Oven officially opened its doors January 6, 2016. We used a wood fired oven that was 4x larger than our original oven from 2016-2024 that was designed by Alex Chernov (StoveMaster) and built by Matt Helicke (Lefthand Masonry) with some help from Joe Janowski.

After 9 years of all out baking, our wood fired oven needed some (expected) major repairs that would involve destroying it and rebuilding the oven core. This, paired with the fact that we were maxed out for capacity, led us to change our oven. We thew an amazing free pizza party for the community as a send off where everyone ate 240 free pizzas and we also burned papers of things we all want to let go of in our last firing of the oven. It was beautiful. Then we closed for a month and took down the old oven, built the new one and generally cleaned the space super hard. Our new oven is a Polin oven from ProBake (gas fired).

What does it mean to bake in a wood fired oven? 

It means you have to be part bread baker and part lumberjack! Our wood is a combination of slab wood scraps we buy locally and wood we have gathered from fallen trees in our area. We split and cure most of our wood ourselves. As they say, "It's the sort of heat that warms you twice!" 

Each night before baking, we build a fire in the oven and maintain it for several hours or more to thoroughly saturate the oven's masonry. It is during this time that we sometimes do pizza (yay for multitasking). Once we reach our desired core temperature in the oven, we burn the coals down to ashes and seal up the oven for the night to allow the heat to equalize throughout the oven mass. In the morning, we rake out any ash and sweep/mop the oven thoroughly so it's clean and ready for the bread baking to begin. 

Baking in a wood fired oven also means we "bake on the curve." Since there's no fire in the oven during baking, we use the stored heat in the oven's masonry to bake our breads. Think of it like a battery we charge up with fire. The order of baking is mostly determined by what temperature a certain bread bakes best at:  breads that can tolerate the highest temperature - like focaccia, flatbreads, pretzels and baguettes - go first. Larger breads, like rye breads and sourdough miches, require a "softer" oven heat and come later in the baking cycle. Managing the oven temperature and the dough readiness for baking is a daily practice and art.

Organic & Local:

We use a variety of grains and flours for our products. All of our sourdough breads in the bakery are made with 100% organic flour (with the exception of our durum and semolina flour for our sesame bread special on Wednesdays). We're also extremely fortunate to have dedicated and skilled organic grain growers right here in Ohio. All of our wholegrain spelt, rye and whole wheat is passionately grown Stutzman's in Millersburg. Our Honey Spelt Bread is made with 100% whole grain organic local spelt. The Vollkornbrot is a traditional German Rye Sourdough that also includes local golden flax seeds & sunflower seeds; give it a try if you’re looking to reduce your gluten. Beyond spelt and rye, we of course buy a lot of local wheat and have also been experimenting with other local organic grains such as Einkorn. If you are looking for local grains, get in touch; we would love to discuss ours and share with you!