From Crust to Crumb

By Anne Spiselman

Mankind cannot live by bread alone, but bread can become mankind’s consuming passion. Just ask Melina Kelson-Podolsky, chef instructor at the School of Culinary Arts of Kendall College.

The 38 year old set out to be an English literature professor but got sidetracked between college and grad school by her baking hobby. The hobby soon blossomed into an obsession with bread and a career that rose to a high point last summer when she spearheaded the construction of an outdoor Roman-style brick oven at Kendall, where she’s taught since 2005. The wood-fired oven, based on a design by Alan Scott detailed in The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1999), was tested after being completed last July, but this will be the first year it gets a full workout— from her artisan bread class.

Kelson-Podolsky, who grew up in a family of food writers—her parents, Allen and Carla Kelson, were long-time chief restaurant critics for Chicago magazine—teaches all courses in the baking and pastry department but attributes her love affair with bread to its infinite possibilities. “Making bread is incredibly challenging and satisfying because you can customize it in many ways,” she explains. “From a single dough, you can prepare so many different things. Just changing one element, such as the amount of fermentation, yields totally different results. It’s an amazing sleight of hand.”

Her interest in food was cultivated by everything from childhood baking experiments, (though she claims she didn’t try anything unusual), to a pre-teen stint at farm camp, not to mention the many restaurant meals she had with her parents. During high school, Kelson- Podolsky worked part-time at such bakeries as Original American Scones (now gone), and, after graduation, she spent a year on a kibbutz in Israel. Ithaca College and the B.A. in English came next, followed by the fateful “breather” that resulted in two years at a Chicago culinary school and a degree in baking and pastries in 1995.

Kelson-Podolsky spent the next five or six years working for various restaurants (Spiaggia, BrasserieT), bakeries, and catering operations but says her intention always was to teach. She got the chance in 2001 when she was hired for the baking and pastry program at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago (CHIC), where she remained until moving to Kendall.

The odyssey of the oven began shortly after Kelson-Podolsky arrived at the School of Culinary Arts. She heard about a community workshop to build a Roman-style oven at the Experimental Station at 61st Street and Blackstone Avenue and, having happily worked with a wood-fired oven in Wisconsin, she signed up to participate. “A dozen people were supposed to do the building, but instead four women spent four 12-to-15-hour days constructing this huge indoor oven with the help of a couple of people who wandered in, and Scott’s son,who led the workshop,” she recalls. The oven is used for monthly community bakes—people bring their own bread—and a few other events, according to Connie Spreen, executive director and co-founder of the Experimental Station.

Fired up by her experience, Kelson-Podolsky made a presentation about the workshop to her colleagues and superiors at Kendall and proposed a similar oven, but almost three years passed until she got the go-ahead in the spring of 2008, thanks partly to a generous donation from George Bay, owner and president of Chicago-based Bays English Muffins and a member of Kendall’s advisory board. In the meantime, she attended a Bread Bakers’ Guild of America bread camp in San Francisco in 2007, where she became friends with baker Dick Bessey, who came to Chicago to help build the Kendall oven. “He did it pro bono because he understands the importance of people participating in—and assuring the continuity of—the process,” she says, “and he knew it required good calculus skills, which he has.”

Constructed near Kendall’s garden with a red brick façade to match the school building, the oven is slightly smaller than the one at the Experimental Station. The hearth measures 42 x 48 inches, and both the hearth and the arch have twelve inches of cladding: four each of refractory cement, vermiculite (a type of insulation), and firebrick (the visible part). There are two doors, a bake door that’s flush with the mouth of the oven to lock in heat and a fire door that’s not flush so some oxygen can flow in. A brick chimney with a little metal flue provides ventilation. Embedded within the oven are six thermocouples, a Scott innovation. “ They measure the temperature in all of the layers, so we know how completely the heat has soaked the cladding,” Kelson- Podolshy explains. “We don’t want a hearth that’s very hot and cement that’s cold for baking bread, because we’d scorch the bottoms of the loaves but the overall temperature would drop,making it harder to have sustained bakes.” She also points out that the purpose of an oven determines the amount of insulation. For example, pizza is baked at a very high temperature with the fire still in the oven (pushed to the side), so less insulation is necessary.

Kendall’s oven, which cost roughly $25,000 ($1,100 for basic materials, the rest for permits, pouring cement footings, the façade and chimney), is designed to be all-purpose, using varying temperatures to cook a variety of offerings. It’s heated up by building successive small wood fires (with kindling and oak currently) over a period of at least a day and a half, then cleaning out the coals and ash. When the temperature reaches 800 degrees F, the oven is ready for quick-cooking flatbreads and pizzas. As it cools to 600 degrees, Kelson-Podolsky bakes yeast breads. “We can comfortably fit a dozen 24-ounce loaves and get three full bakes from one firing,” she reports, adding that she saves “fat doughs,” such as cinnamon rolls and croissants, for 400 degrees, the cool end of the bread spectrum.

One beauty of the oven is that it’s fully sustainable, according to Kelson-Podolsky. Once the temperature falls to 400–325 degrees, it’s perfect for searing, roasting, and braising meats, as well as baking cakes, cookies and…anything you’d do in a regular oven. Even at 200 degrees, it can be used to dry herbs or vegetables, such as tomatoes.

For her artisan bread courses, which typically cover breakfast pastries as well as yeast doughs and focus on techniques ranging from preparing different preferments to making multigrain breads, Kelson-Podolsky admits that she doesn’t do all the baking outdoors. “ The wood-fired oven is superior for flatbreads because you need searingly hot temperatures to kill the yeast quickly and curtail leavening,” she explains, “but for other breads, it can be a mixed blessing. The baking tends to be at a hotter temperature resulting in more caramelization and amore robust flavor, but the inability to control temperature consistency and the amount of steam results in variables like hot spots and very crusty loaves with a crackly rustic finish, which are drawbacks for mass production.” Besides pizza, the flatbreads baked in the oven include focaccia, pita, fougasse, and other ethnic specialties.

Kelson-Podolsky has a final tip for anyone who’s going to make or eat artisan bread, which she loosely defines as hand-made using high-quality ingredients (e.g. unbleached, unbromated flour from hard red winter wheat) and older techniques (a short time in the mixer, long time on the bench). “Never cut into a loaf while it’s hot,” she says. “It will compromise its integrity. You should wait until the bread cools, the alcohol in it dissipates, the crust develops, and the flavor transfers from the crust to the crumb.”

Anne Spiselman has written for nearly every major Chicago publication and has her pulse on the local food scene for Edible Chicago. Lately, she’s been reviewing restaurants for the Chicago Reader and working on off-the beaten- path food stories about budding entrepreneurs.

Those flatbreads, along with some leavened breads baked outside, are being offered in The Dining Room at Kendall College, which is open to the public for lunch and dinner. Chris Koetke, dean of the School of Culinary Arts, is excited about the possibilities and says the chefs also are planning wood-fired oven specials, among them roast leg of lamb, pork shoulder, chicken, and vegetables. The Dining Room at Kendall College 900 N. Branch St. 312-752-2328. Call for hours and reservations.