FLAMES FROM THE DRAGON'S HEART

A Ceramic, wood-fired bakers' oven was installed in a London restaurant this month. A modest step in itself, but one huge and joyous step backwards for mankind. It represents not just a total rejection of modern baking technology, but a return to the craft as it was developed in Egypt some 5,000 years ago.

Why would they want to do that? "To make better tasting bread," says its inventor, Paul Merry, who has come to London to set up the oven and teach the chefs how to operate it. "The young cooks have travelled to Europe and they know that brick ovens are the bees' knees. Modern steel ovens can't produce this quality of heat."

Intense, deep heat builds up in the walls of a brick oven, explains Merry, the kind of heat necessary for crusty country breads, tasty flatbreads, well-textured and robust sourdoughs, crispy pizzas. And that's only the beginning. In a restaurant it doubles up as an oven for cakes and puddings and all manner of savoury dishes, roasts and casseroles. "This sort of oven doesn't yield its secrets all at once. It calls for skill and craft," he says. "It's hard work. But there are more cooks coming to love the rustic, hands-on, get-dirty sort of thing. You've got to stoke up this oven. You've actually got to work it."

And the modern chef doesn't object? "Not if you want to put back flavour into food," says bearded Jake Hodges, son of film director Mike Hodges, and one of the cooks at Moro, the new restaurant in London's Clerkenwell area where the oven has been installed. "I'm a Luddite. Modern food equipment - blenders, microwaves, steel ovens - are quick but they don't improve the taste of food."

The new oven, set up in pride of place, has already taken on the appearance of a fire-god. It is both ancient and modern. In part, it resembles an Islamic domed mosque and, in part, a Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a spaceman's helmet. When kindling is fed into its cavernous belly it is an awesome sight, converting the pieces of dry wood into thunderous dragons' tongues of flame which fill its mouth and are then spat out through a gaping iron visor.

This particular oven is the invention of the inspired, and inspiring, Melbourne-born baker, Paul Merry, who spent three years working at Andrew Whitley's award-winning Village Bakery in Melmerby, Penrith in Cumbria. Then, four years ago, he changed course and switched from baking to consultancy, building an oven in his own home in order to conduct baking classes - known as Leavens Above.

The Melmerby bakery owns a large, wood-fired, brick oven which was custom- built by a team of French builders. But ovens on this scale can cost from pounds 25,000 to pounds 35,000, and take more than six weeks to install. Merry decided to make one on a smaller scale.

He teamed up with a Gloucester ceramics and cement expert, Reinhart von Zschock. They enclosed a traditional brick oven floor inside a refractory concrete dome shell. "It's actually made with a cement fondue, like a plum pudding studded with blobs, shards and chips of ceramic. It is made up in four parts so that it can be easily dovetailed together." And at pounds 5,000, it cost a fraction of the traditional brick oven.

By now the oven is ready for baking. Jake shuts out the flames gushing into the oven by drawing back a metal plate using a hooked rod. What's that? "This is the push-me-pull-me unit."

The thermometer on the dome had been reading a meltdown temperature of 1,000F (500C), double that of any home oven. With the oven floor's panel pulled shut, the temperature settles at around 600F (300C) and baking can begin.

Dipping into covered bowls of ripening dough, Merry hacks off pieces with a plastic scraper and shows the four cooks standing by some of his moulding techniques, rolling and twisting, stretching and slapping lumps with easy familiarity. The cooks, Jake Hodges, Peter Jordan and the two Sam Clarks (husband and wife) take turns and start feeding the hungry oven mouth, sliding in the flatbreads with skilful movements of the wooden paddle or peel.

Cottage loaves are slashed with a sharp Japanese knife, the cuts allowing the dough to inflate in the oven. In go ciabatta breads, made with a loose, wet dough. "In Italy," says Merry, "a well-schooled hotshot baker would make the dough so wet that it's almost unmanageable."

Mrs Sam Clark is the most experienced baker in the team. She uncovers a 16in-wide basket in which her sourdough has been rising. It bakes to nut brown in less than 25 minutes, and comes from the oven with a pattern that is as beautiful as a piece of glazed pottery. By common assent the sourdough is voted the king of the breads, a loaf made without yeast, or, at least, without the high-speed efficiency of bought commercial yeast. It is made from what is called a starter, a mixture of flour and water which ferments naturally, generating its own yeast. When you first make it (Clark used a French trick, mixing in some black grape juice) you must nurse it along for a week or two, feeding it like a baby until it's strong enough to support an adult role of producing great loaves like Sam's 16-incher.

Sourdoughs work slowly, which doesn't worry these guys (the slower the doughs, the tastier the bread). For example, if you wanted to make a sourdough loaf tomorrow, before going to bed tonight, you would need to mix a loose batter or sponge. A sourdough starter is combined with equal parts of flour and water and left for eight hours or so. The timing is not precise.

"In the morning," says Clark, "it will be bubbling over like Vesuvius." She adds flour to make it up to a kneadable dough and then puts it in a woven basket lined with a floured cloth and leaves it to rise for a few hours. The longer it is left the better, but there is a point (especially in a hot kitchen) after six hours or so when the raising power of the yeast is exhausted.

In the restaurant, she will be keeping back some of the sourdough from each batch to seed the next day's baking. She leaves it out all day in the kitchen, a' feeding and a' fussing it. At home, assuming we bake only once every week or 10 days, and on a smaller scale, you can keep back half a pound of dough from each batch and feed it with a little flour and water from time to time.

Ask any Californian. In 1849, when Cali- fornians headed north to prospect for gold in the Yukon they were known as Sourdoughs because they were in the habit of keeping the sourdough for the next day's bread under the bedclothes as they slept at night. You can put yours in the fridge in a plastic box and, well- tended, it could last you a lifetime.

Moro is at 34-36 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE, telephone: 0171 833 8336