Almost twenty years ago, Juli Vanderhoop started cooking with fire.
"Someone said you bake every day, you gotta build this. Build this oven! And I just said, ‘You’re crazy,’ and I went to an oven build, and I fell in love with this."
This is an outdoor oven made from a combination of the world’s most thermodynamic clay — called Terre blanche or white earth, from France — and local fieldstone. The oven measures seven feet across on the inside and ten feet across on the outside and it took Juli and a local mason 10 months to build. Then Juli had to teach herself how to use it.
"So over the course of five years, this was my teacher. So I’d have to think about it, it was a puzzle, it was a science experiment, every day," Juli said.
"That challenge of getting something just so right — and the oven when it’s really hot, it’s like it’s waiting for you to put something into it so that it can work the magic."
The magic starts with the first ingredient — wood.
"I’m watching the age of my wood, the season on it, and I use predominantly oak, because that’s what I’m finding burns hot and fast."
Once the oven is hot — which can take up to twenty-four hours — Juli sweeps away the coals and gets ready to bake.
"So it’s built so that the oven is cruising at about 460 degrees. So sometimes when we've got something that's like pies or lighter breads, like cinnamon raisin or something like that, uh, cakes. We have to wait a long time before the oven actually falls down."
Juli can also control the temperature of the oven by moving baked goods around — pushing cold cookies into the place where she was just cooking hot bread — this juggling act tempers the oven. And she has to pay attention to the weather.
"Especially on the season change I will find about a 1-inch center of the breads that’s not quite done," she said. "Unless I’m really on my game and thinking about all of the elements, the temperature, the humidity, the wind — I don’t just flip a switch to turn this thing on you know and it’s using all of my abilities to get it just right."
This is a big part of what Juli loves about baking in her wood-fire oven. She’s outside year-round and interacting with her community — a community that is sometimes fractured but that comes together around the oven for good food and conversation. Juli is a Wampanoag tribal member and a selectperson in Aquinnah and her family has been on the land where she built the oven for thousands of years. She says for her, this connection aspect of baking is just as important as the food.
"Building the bakery from scratch, and having the business grow and having this wild idea that, you know, I could do a bakery where the oven is outside and that it's a community oven and to invite the community in and that having a community oven here in Aquinnah where there's two different governments which are often at opposite ends of agreement — It's just so, so good."
This combination of experiences has taught Juli Vanderhoop to believe that almost anything is possible. She told me she bakes during hurricanes, nor’easters, in the deep snow even — and people come to the far reaches of Aquinnah to eat pizzas or croissants or whatever it is she’s baking.
Juli Vanderhoop calls her business Orange Peel Bakery after the tools called peels she uses to slide under her baked goods and move them around the oven.
