the eternal fascination of bread-baking
Kneading your own dough and baking bread like in the olden days: Here in a historic building with an old bakery, this interactive opportunity at the Rupertiwinkel Farm Museum is guaranteed to leave you with lasting impressions, while a walk through the museum itself will bring the rural world of the past back to life.
The seductive fragrances of freshly baked bread dough and fine roasting aromas are certain to make your mouth water. Even though, in today’s world, we can go to a bakery or supermarket and choose from a wide selection of baked products practically in the blink of an eye, it is always a special experience if you have the luxury of baking bread for yourself. Even more so, when that experience includes the traditional, smoke-blackened bakery with a stone stove at the Farm Museum. And with Franz Huber (76), known locally as the “Bauer z’Hof”, just outside Kirchanschöring, bread baking is transformed into a truly sensual and compelling event.
Master organic baker Michael Wahlich shows us how freshly ground flour is turned into delectably fragrant bread. He is a cooperating partner of the Waginger See Model Eco-Region and assists Franz Huber with his demonstrations at the Farm Museum. Without resorting to additives of any kind, purely from regionally sourced organic whole-grain rye flour, water, rock salt and natural sourdough, he has started a bread dough using traditional baking techniques. Around the big table in the wood-paneled kitchen, several baker’s assistants, big and small, wait eagerly to get their hands on the stickily lumpy dough and knead it powerfully with their fingers on top of a generous dusting of flour, before finally allowing it to rest in the proving baskets. Oh, how wonderfully squishy and messy the dough is! Organic baker Wahlich makes it clear that, for a bread to be a success, you don’t only need the right flour and precise measurements, you also have to give the dough plenty of time to prove and to rest.
Inside the old bakery made of slag blocks, Franz Huber has now heated up the oven with logs of beechwood. Crackling and glowing red, they also warm the floor and the vaulted ceiling. So that the 30 small loaves don’t burn, Huber scrapes out the excess ashes and embers, cleans the baking surface with a damp straw broom, and does a quick flour test to see if the temperature has reached around 200°C. Then, essentially with a flick of the wrist, the bread disappears into the mouth of the oven. Now, while the bread is busy “doing its thing”, visitors tour the Farm Museum learning all kinds of intriguing details about how grain cultivation used to be vital for survival, and just how arduous and frugal life in the country used to be. Back then, bread would only be baked once every two weeks. And now, everyone is visibly delighted as the fantastically fragrant rye bread, after passing a brief tapping test, is pulled out of the oven and, just a little bit later, enjoyed with fresh herbal butter.
In collaboration with organic baker Michael Wahlich from Saaldorf-Surheim, the Rupertiwinkel Farm Museum offers bread-baking workshops on two different dates, including lots of useful information as well as a short museum tour:
on Tuesday, July 24 and Tuesday, August 21.
In both cases, the workshops begin at 9 AM.
The fee is €12 per person.
Registration is through the Kirchanschöring Tourist Information Office,
Tel. +49 (0)8685 7793920
