Customer since: September 2012
CanSpace has been a great service for us over the years. Their basic hosting package […] makes having a website affordable even for a tiny business. We can curate our own web presence to interact with our customers and avoid social media altogether.
Leila Sumi and Birch Kuch, Owners, Whisky Jack Cache
Tell us a little bit about yourself and where you are located.
Whisky Jack Cache is an organic wood-fired sourdough bread bakery located in an artsy gold mining town in the Cariboo Mountains of central BC. We are a couple-run business with no employees, and we fire up our brick oven every two weeks to provide quality bread to loyal customers and local retail outlets. We love to paddle and ski, and lay down spacey grooves with our dance band, the Interstellar Jays. Mostly, we prefer to live a reclusive life out of town.
What is Whisky Jack Cache?
Bread, made right, with ample portions of whole grain and plenty of wild yeast and bacteria, is very healthy. Such bread is remarkably hard to find in our age, so we would like people to know that it can exist, it does exist, and if it existed more commonly we would all be better off.
What is the difference between a wood fired sourdough vs regular oven?
Stone and brick ovens are small caves with a flat floor and one opening, designed to absorb heat from a fire that burns inside them for many hours. When the fire goes out and the hearth is cleaned of ashes, the mass of the oven will radiate its stored heat into its hollow interior.
Radiant heat is a light that can shine through a loaf, heating its interior at the same time the air temperature is crusting over its exterior. Our oven fits 20 loaves, and the first batch goes in at about 320ºC (above 600ºF). The door is sealed and the oven instantly fills with steam evaporating from the surface of the loaves, cooking the first batch in 15 minutes. The loaves are baked evenly, forming a crunchy crust and chewy crumb that is hard to mimic any other way. As the oven cools, each batch takes 2-3 minutes longer to bake.
Whether gas or electric, conventional ovens cycle on and off, raising and lowering the oven temperature slightly. They heat the air around the loaf rather than shining heat into the loaf itself, and let that air vent to the outside. Loaves take twice as long to bake, so even with the addition of steam, the crust will never be the same. Deck ovens, popular with pizza, can get close if they have a heavy mass to charge up and a vent that closes.
Wood fired verses gas fired shouldn’t make a difference to bread fired in a brick oven, as the flame is out before the bread goes in. We burn local pine because that’s what we have plenty of.
Why did you get into this line of work? What’s the best thing about it?
Birch became interested in sourdough when he was in college, primarily because it was cheaper to make bread at home without yeast, but also because it tasted better and gave him more energy. He fell in love with the feel of the dough and the smell of the starter, which led him to find work in baking and brewing.
Leila learned about drawing and print making from her mother. She particularly likes to draw and carve the entertaining critters that live in the forest around us. Her images give our labels and branding a distinctive look that feels like us.
We like the flexibility our business gives us, the feeling that we are providing something good and useful to the community, and the small but steady cash flow. Also, we get to eat better bread than we can make at home.
What does it take to be great at what you do?
The passion is simple. It’s the ingredients that count.
Uncompromising attention to detail, careful sourdough management, temperature control.
Courteous customer service without excess contact.
How does CanSpace solve the objectives you have for your website?
CanSpace has been a great service for us over the years. Their basic hosting package, in conjunction with open source platforms and an inexpensive payment system, makes having a website affordable even for a tiny business. We can curate our own web presence to interact with our customers and avoid social media altogether. Also, we aren’t locked into a comprehensive store platform, which gives our website a lot of flexibility. CanSpace’s support has been timely and meaningful whenever we’ve needed it.
