Hi, I’m Karen.

​I didn't really mean to move to Boulder, Utah, nor to start my own business baking out of an old wood-fired oven.

I had worked as a wilderness guide for 10 years before becoming interested in baking as a profession. I had (sort of) lived in southern Utah since 2012, but also spent seasons abroad, working and traveling in Chilean Patagonia, and several years on the road full-time in a converted shuttle bus, touring the West's best climbing areas while teaching outdoor skills and wilderness medicine. Among all of this, Utah served as a home base, a place I returned to for part of each year. While I attempted to move out of state every single year from 2014 to 2019, I somehow kept ending up back.

In 2019, I found myself in Boulder, with an unexpected opportunity to become the caretaker of a wood-fired oven and use it to hone my baking skills. The learning curve was steep. After one more departure— the 6th year in a row I claimed I was moving away from Utah— I came back and officially established Boulder Bread. Now in my sixth season here, I continue to learn more with each new bake.

I am a self-taught baker. The way I see it, you can either spend money on schooling, or you can spend it on ingredients. I chose the latter route, the learn-as-you-go one. Fortunately, the residents of Boulder Town were interested and supportive, and enough of my mistakes were edible that I could make a little money from them as I went, building this business from the ground up. Baking is now my main source of income, and a beautiful way to feel grounded in a community. I love what I do.

MORE ABOUT BOULDER BREAD…

SOURDOUGH

My wood fired loaves are naturally leavened— what is commonly referred to as sourdough. This means that instead of yeast from a packet, I use a wild yeast starter that I mixed back in 2019 and continue to feed daily. It is a living culture. In the bread dough, these friendly micro-organisms works away at digesting sugars, leaving behind air bubbles that form the holey structure of the baked loaf. This long fermentation process (24+ hours from initial mix to bake) is thought to increase digestibility in the final product. If you are typically sensitive to gluten, you may find that naturally leavened breads are more friendly to your digestion.

BAKING WITH WOOD HEAT

With a wood oven, the bake cycle starts the day prior to the actual baking of bread. Wood is fed steadily over the course of the day, saturating the masonry with heat. Smoky at first, the fire builds into a massive coal bed as the firebrick baking surface burns from sooty black to ash gray. If we are making pizza, it happens this evening, when the oven settles in at about 700-800 degrees. At bedtime, I shove in one last armful of wood, tucking the oven in for the night, and go home to sleep a few hours. In the early morning I'm back and checking to make sure the residual heat is at a good temperature for baking loaves. Contrary to what most have been taught, there is a lot of leeway in baking temperatures. The most important thing is to pay attention. In general, though, the bake occurs in a succession of falling temperatures: breads bake in the 500-degree zone, bagels and pastry in the 400s, muffins, cookies, cakes, and granola in the 300s. Into the third day, the oven maintains a low heat that can be used for slow-cooking projects: anything from braising a pork shoulder to dehydrating apricots. Each bake cycle, I am striving to make the most efficient use of the heat as possible.

DO YOU BAKE EVERYTHING IN THE WOOD OVEN?

In the beginning I did. Back then, it was just me, the wood oven, and a two-burner propane camp stove outside. Every single baked good or ingredient, such as toasted nuts for a cookie recipe, happened in the wood oven. Every caramel, pudding or curd was made on the camp stove. Even boiling water required a trip outside to the two-burner. It was fun, but sort of tricky, especially in the late season when I’d be trying to make a half dozen tarts for Thanksgiving, blind-baking crusts in the wood oven and cooking cranberry curd on the camp stove by headlamp as it got dark around 5pm.

In 2021, I got a small range for the interior kitchen space— a game-changer, to say the least. Now I can do a variety of prep tasks indoors as I prepare for the big bakes outside. I still bake every sourdough loaf and bagel in the wood oven— there’s no way to bake at that scale in my small oven, not to mention the difference in quality. I bake cookies, muffins, granola and other treats in the wood oven whenever I can align prep with oven firing. I think that everything bakes better in the wood oven.

SUSTAINABILITY

Wood fired baking may give the impression of being a resource-intensive way to bake. After over six years of baking this way, I think my answer would be both yes and no. Certainly, chainsawing and chopping hundreds of pounds of wood, then shoving it onto a steadily growing coal bed over 10 hours is a pretty in-your-face way of experiencing your own energy consumption. At the same time, the majority of wood I use to fire the oven are clean scraps that would otherwise end up in the landfill or burn piles. We have helped neighbors clear out dead and downed trees, promoting greater health of their living forests, and have salvaged clean untreated carpentry scraps that were headed for the dump. I haven’t actually harvested oven wood from public lands for several years now— I’m able to get everything I need from around town.

Using scrap wood like this is a regular practice in wood-fired baking, and it works because of how long and hot the firing process is. To get the oven to a place that it can maintain its consistent heat for baking the next day, I use the firing day to slowly heat it to 1000+ degrees. At this point all ash and smoke burn off, taking the oven from sooty black to clean and gray, ready for baking. It’s after that high-heat firing, as the oven cools down and falls through the temperatures, that the residual heat in the firebrick is used to cook food.

Boulder locals with wood to donate: if you have scrap wood, a burn pile, or dead trees that you would like cleared, my friends and I are happy to help out! I love to trade bread and baked goods for wood donations, or we can help you process wood and split the pile with you. We even bring our own chainsaw. :) ​If you are local and interested in supporting my amateur arborist skills, send me an email.