Baking in the Sun

Rural Haiti isn’t known for its cutting edge technology, but the mission is supporting an entrepreneur who is trying to bake bread in a really interesting way. The mission has a small initiative that supports local businesses, and one baker with whom we are working is using a solar oven to bake bread.

The amazing thing about the solar oven is that it doesn’t require an external power. As seen in the picture, the oven is huge. It’s probably twelve or fifteen high, it sits on wheels, and it bakes delicious bread. It can use gas power if its cloudy outside, but the gigantic mirrors on top focus the sun light on to the oven, allowing the bread to bake fully under the sun’s rays. The oven itself, the space below the mirrors where the dough sits, kind of looks like display case, (except instead of holding already baked bread it hold dough becoming baked bread). The temperature of the oven varies, and thus the time to produce on batch depends on the weather, but it can cook bread fully just like an American oven. Some of the bread that I have eaten from it has been a little denser than I am used to, and still a little doughy, but that is a result a Haitian preference for denser bread rather than the ability of the oven. Some of the bread has been identical to the fresh bread I’ve bought in American bakeries. No matter how doughy or fluffy the bread is, it’s certainly just as tasty as any bread I’ve had in the US, and it’s been the staple of my diet since I got here. The oven produces bread in massive quantities. I unfortunately don’t have any pictures of the bread being loaded out, but it each batch is composed of multiple potato sacks full of bread.

Though a solar oven might not be an efficient way to make bread in the US outside of Brooklyn’s artisanal food and craft market, it has decent potential in Haiti; especially for anyone looking to start his or her own business. The initial payment to purchase the oven would probably be pretty expensive, but the only cost after the oven is bought is the dough. I don’t know the exact nature of the market for bread in Haiti, but there are thousands of men and women hawking all sorts of food in the urban areas, and I don’t see why they couldn’t sell bread in addition to multitude of other things sold on the street.  There are also thousands of people selling produce in the larger market places, and I imagine that someone could make a decent living selling bread. The bread could also be sold to schools for the student’s lunches. The main staple of the Haitian diet is rice, but many Haitians enjoy bread and, as long as the price was low enough, would integrate it into their diet.

The greatest benefit of the solar oven is that it is self-containing; it doesn’t need anything else to hook up to or to run on in order to work, it just needs sun light to cook the dough, and Haiti has plenty of sun. Getting anything anywhere in Haiti is relatively complicated, and utilities like gas and electricity are inconsistent. If someone wanted to set up an American bakery in Haiti, they would have a pretty difficult time. The power quits so regularly, so keeping the lights on would be enough of a challenge, let alone keeping something like an oven powered long enough to bake a few loaves of bread. The solar oven on the other hand, can bake massive quantities of bread in one batch, needing only sunlight, something Haiti is loaded with. The oven is also on wheels, so the baker can move it around if he is getting too much shade in one spot.

I don’t know how much success the baker running the solar powered oven has had so far, but he has certainly produced a lot of really great for me, and everyday a few more potato sacks of bread come up to the foyer outside my room. In a few weeks the owner of Bethel Bakery is coming to La Croix with Westminster to help the baker, and I can only imagine how great the fruits (or loaves) of their labor will be.