The Fourneau Bread Oven will be manufactured in the United States.
Keeping it Made in America is Ted and Sharon Burdett’s bread and butter as owners of the successful Chicago-based design studio, Strand Design.
So naturally, when the pair decided to create an easy-to-use tool that allows even the most inexperienced chefs to bake artisan bread at home, they promised to manufacturer it in the United States. Now they need your help to bring it to market.
The Burdetts are seeking $90,000 in pledges on Kickstarter to manufacture the cast-iron Fourneau Bread Oven, which is designed to bake bread with the no-knead recipe made famous by Mark Bittman of The New York Times (although Ted Burdett tells us the Fourneau also makes great pizzas).
For a pledge of $35 or more, backers will receive a Fourneau Bread Recipe Book, which contains the Burdetts’ favorite recipes and techniques. For $195 or more, backers will get the Fourneau from the first production run, which is slated to begin in June.
Like Stand Design’s line of furniture, lighting and home accessories, the Fourneau will be manufactured in the United States. Indiana-based tool maker Hoosier Pattern, who helped prototype the Fourneau using 3D printed sand molds, will perform the engineering and manufacturing during the oven’s initial run.
The Burdetts were inspired to design the oven after years of baking no-knead bread at home, but found that there wasn’t a right tool out there for the baking process.
“In the name of perfect crust, we had tried just about everything, and we got tired of hefting scorching hot casserole dishes out of the oven,” the Burdetts explain on the Kickstarter site. “We loved the result of baking in this way, but we were tired of the clunky tools.”
So the designing duo got to work, sketching out hundreds of potential products and then working through “countless computer models” over the course of a year. What they ultimately went with is a design described as simple, effective and easy to use.
To bake using the Fourneau, place it in your oven to preheat. Once it’s up to temperature, put your dough on the solid wood bread peel, slide it into the Fourneau and close the hatch, which traps the steam from the baking bread. When the bread is baked, slide it out. “Best of all, the Fourneau gives you total creative control to make any shape of bread that you want,” Sharon Burdett explains in an instructional video.
As of Friday afternoon, 300 backers had pledged $62,893, with 18 days left to raise the remaining $27,107 needed to fund the project.
Click here to visit the Fourneau Bread Oven page on Kickstarter.