Tassie baker Cameron Mckenzie had a simple dream of opening an unplugged bakery. With dough mixed by hand and bread baked among the bricks of the woodfired oven, his dream is now a roaring success in Cygnet Woodfired Bakehouse.

The town of Cygnet, 45 minutes’ drive south of Hobart, is the kind of town people escape to. Perhaps you’ve visited. Perhaps you live there. Perhaps you’ve seen it on Australian television shows Rosehaven or The Kettering Incident, and that way know of its lush tumbling countryside, or mirrored surface of its Huon River.

It’s here that Cameron Mckenzie realised his dream of becoming the town baker. He doesn’t have grand dreams of expanding or franchising; he dreams of a business that allows him time to carefully practise his craft. The kind of unplugged bakery where, after hours on a Monday night, he can take his young son, flick the lights on and warm their dinner in the woodfired oven, its bricks still warm from the weekend’s bake. The kind of business where everyone’s on a first-name-only basis—there’s Richard, the guy who supplies the wallaby game meat, and Shannon, who Cameron credits as his mentor in the art of sourdough baking.

“[The bakehouse has] been really successful in its first year,” Cameron says.

“My aim is just to keep it running as a small-town unplugged bakery. Everybody says you should franchise and go bigger, and I just don’t think that’s real. The more people involved—the more different bakers, the bigger you get—the less attention to detail there is in the bread.”

His handmade, back-to-basics ethos sits well in the town of Cygnet.

“Cygnet seems to attract treechangers and seachangers—people who are consciously making a decision to move here. They want to do something better for the earth; they come down here and try to buy locally and not just feed off the big supermarkets and the big conglomerates. They’re quite green and ethically sound. They don’t like poison in their food.”

Cameron is self-taught, mastering the art of baking, gelato making and oven building through research and experimentation, along with a few beers with experts along the way. He designed and built the brick woodfired oven in the unplugged bakehouse.

“It’s two-and-a-half metres long from the door to the back of the oven and one-point-six metres wide, so eight foot by six foot—so it’s pretty big,” he laughs.

The first fire of the week is lit on Tuesdays at midday.

“It takes half an hour to load the oven with wood that I get from a mill in the Huon Valley,” Cameron says.

“We build a couple of Jenga stacks in the oven with the offcuts from the mill.”

While the fire’s burning, Cameron and his team get to work hand mixing sourdough, which goes through two proofs.

“Just after we’ve finished shaping, the fire will have burnt out, so it’s maybe six hours’ worth of burn to get the fire right down to coal. Then we scrape the coal, the oven adjusts it temperature—sort of equalises its heat—and then it’s ready to bake,” Cameron explains.

Baking starts around seven o’clock at night. They bake the ciabattas first—they’re a smaller bread, so a quicker cook—and then the larger sourdough loaves. In the morning, all the heat that’s still in the oven cooks the danish pastries and croissants.

The oven is around 300 degrees Celsius when Cameron first starts to bake in the evening, then slowly drops overnight.

“It’s about 260 degrees at five or six in the morning,” Cameron says.

“The nature of these ovens, they’re just really well insulated. None of the heat escapes; it’s just all stored in the bricks.”

In fact, the oven never cools all the way down—something that’s never far from Cameron’s mind. The unplugged bakehouse building is divided in two, with Cameron living in the the back half of the building.

“I’ve always got this burning thought in my head that I’ve got this oven in there with heat in it. It never gets below 160 degrees Celsius,” he says.

“The oven spring of that radiant heat, it’s intense. When your loaves are ready and they’re proofed, they’re ready to burst; they’re ready to grow a bit in the oven and finish off their fermentation and set, and the oven spring is unbelievable. I’ve never really had the same kind of intense heat in an electric oven. The bricks seem to feed that heat all the way through.”

Cameron cites timing as the biggest factor when working with wood ovens.

“With an electric oven you organise your scheduling to how it fits you and the rest of the kitchen. With the woodfired oven you schedule all that production around the heat or the timing of the heat,” he explains.

The bakehouse does have an electric oven as a backup, but it’s used as rarely as possible.

At the cooler end, the team bakes cakes, while up near the oven’s highest temperature, the heat is perfect for cooking meat.

“We do a wallaby, a chicken and a beef pie, and those meats are put into trays while the fire’s burning about halfway through the burn. There’s flames going over the top and it’s about 450 degrees in there—it’s this really quick searing of the meat,” Cameron says.

With an oven as hot and as big as the one in the Cygnet bakehouse, operating the peel is an art in itself.

“People use peels in electric deck ovens as well but they’re quite a short peel and they’re usually only a single or maybe two trays deep. With this one, you’re pushing the peel eight feet into the oven to get the tray out of the back corner. Sometimes you push a muffin further down than you want. It’s a bit tricky to get your arm all the way in and scoop it out. There’s quite a technique to it.”

Much of the appeal of woodfired ovens, for Cameron, lies in their timelessness.

“Building a brick oven means that potentially for the next hundred years it’s going to always be an oven, and for me that was really important. You’ve built it out of masonry, so it’s not going to deteriorate.

“I think traditional bread is such an amazing product. Naturally leavened, long-fermented bread that’s baked in a wood oven is quite a special product. Hopefully I can keep this bakehouse as a beautiful unplugged bakery that can kick along forever.”