June 11, 2013
Do you get up in the middle of the night to start baking?
Rosendal’s Garden, Stockholm, Sweden

"Do you get up in the middle of the night to start baking?" I ask, because in my mind that is what bakers do. But Linnea Lindqvist says they don't. If you have a good oven, and the right ingredients and baking technique, the breads will get a crust that keeps the bread fresh for days. So they bake in the day time.

Linnea Lindqvist is one of the bakers that bake in the wood fired oven at Rosendal’s Garden in Stockholm. Their way of baking has been developed by skilled bakers at Rosendal since the oven was built in 1998.

The oven, built on location using sixteen tons of bricks, is one of the largest wood fired ovens in Scandinavia. Linnea Lindqvist is happy with the oven and tells me that she enjoys gazing into the fire. But baking is hard work and she suggests that the ergonomics of the oven could be improved.

The oven is well insulated so the bakers can fire it in the afternoon and bake all day the next day. Different breads are baked as the heat drops in the oven. in the morning, they bake wheat bread and later rye bread. Even though the oven is well insulated plenty of heat radiates from it. Next to the bakery there are several greenhouses and I ask if they have thought of using the excess heat from the oven to heat a greenhouse. That would have been great they say. They didn't think of it when they built the bakehouse, but they would like to do it in the future.

The bread is sold in the garden's café and a store that sells produce from the garden. All is run by a non-profit organization whose purpose is for Rosendal’s Garden to be publicly accessible space for ecological cultivation and education.

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