Melissa Pasanen

Free Press correspondent

HUNTINGTON – Discreetly concealed behind a living fence of tree branches and vines, across from Jubilee Farm’s historic white barn, sits a 40-foot red shipping container stamped with the “K” Line logo.

The pastoral road to Camels Hump is an unexpected landing spot for an international freight container, but over the last decade these durable, weatherproof steel boxes have increasingly been deployed beyond their original purpose of hauling cargo around the world.

They have been upcycled into emergency shelters, tiny houses, cafés and artist studios, among many uses.

Baker Adam Wilson was not looking to ride that trend or make an environmental statement when he moved his wood-fired bakery business from Bread and Butter Farm in Shelburne into a pair of 10-foot and 40-foot shipping containers that he placed on rented land at Jubilee Farm in Huntington in March.

Wilson, 36, arrived upon the idea because he was seeking flexibility and simplification in life and business, he explained last Wednesday while prepping for Running Stone Bread’s weekly bake in the larger container that serves as his production space.

The name Running Stone, he said, refers to both the top stone in a traditional stone grain mill that moves against the fixed bottom stone, and to his passion for trail running.

“Physically and mentally, running balances out the intensity of the bakery,” Wilson explained. “Then there’s the irony of a stone that is running. Like the bakery, it’s something in motion that you don’t expect to be moving.”

Contained commitment

Even on a rainy day like last Wednesday, windows and glass doors cut into the steel walls filled the container with light. A luminous lime-green floor and white-washed pine ceiling added further brightness.

Opening a door on the side of the production container, Wilson showed how Running Stone’s 15,000-pound masonry oven was built directly into a 10-foot container tucked next to the 40-footer. Wood to fire the oven was stacked neatly with a backdrop of green fields and rolling hills.

A third wood-framed structure, which was built on skids, is called the baking porch and spans the front door of the production container and the bread-loading end of the oven container, providing a staging area for tall racks of bread dough ready to be baked. (It still needs insulation and windows installed before cold weather sets in.)

All three of the bakery components can be moved, Wilson pointed out, making them a modular bakery version of a mobile tiny house.

The containers, in a way, symbolize Wilson’s desire to contain the bakery business, to fit it into “a sustainable number of hours,” as he put it. “I want to be able to help friends with projects and be a good neighbor, to have a rounded life.”

Passion and focus

In 2009, Wilson and Corie Pierce co-founded Bread and Butter Farm, a small diversified operation straddling Shelburne and South Burlington. The farm raises vegetables, operates a farmstand and hosts popular summer burger nights as well a summer camps and other events.

Wilson and his partner Erik Weil, a professional gardener, lived on the farm in a small house they built themselves.

Bread and Butter brought Wilson’s dual passions for baking and farming together, both of which he’d explored out west after graduating from Dartmouth College with an anthropology degree.

In California, he met Dave Miller of Miller’s Bake House and fell in love with wood-fired baking.

“My dad is a real food person. My mom is an artist,” Wilson said. “I feel like bread is a combination of the two things. Bread is like making food art out of bags of grain.”

Wilson moved home to work on a New Jersey farm, but it wasn’t a fit. He started baking 25 loaves a week in his family’s kitchen, delivering by bike around the neighborhood. “Just because I couldn’t not do it,” he said with a smile.

Vermont drew him because of support for both farming and baking, he said. He started baking in a public oven on the Norwich town green and then built ovens in Chelsea and Westford.

At Bread and Butter Farm, Wilson managed the small dairy herd and developed a reputation for hearty, whole-grain German-style breads baked in the wood-fired masonry oven. Customers could see the whole process in action when they came to shop at the farmstand.

Much as he appreciated that all the on-farm activity helped connect people to their food, Wilson gradually realized that the complexity did not work for him.

“I wanted to focus on the bakery,” he said. “I guess I felt spread thin for a long time. I wanted to own a business that was simpler.”

Investment in mobility

Considering options for a stand-alone bakery business, Wilson recalled hearing about a shipping container-based bakery in California.

The idea of a movable oven and bakery appealed since he had left so many behind and was not prepared to purchase land in addition to building a bakery.

The project was not cheap, Wilson said, estimating the final cost at about $120,000. It was worth it, he said, to build a beautiful, optimally functional space that could move with him.

For $4,800 apiece, Wilson said, “you get a weatherproof, steel shell, which structurally you couldn’t touch for that price if you were building it from scratch.” Plus, they were built to travel.

Wilson and Weil did much of the work themselves with assistance from welders, electricians, plumbers and masonry oven expert Jeremiah Church. They were able to reuse some of the bricks, insulation, doors and stove pipe from the Bread and Butter Farm oven, although Wilson wishes it had been more.

Running Stone Bread found an ideal first home when Wilson connected with Sarah Jane Williamson of Jubilee Farm through a mutual friend.

The site was well-located for his main retail accounts and as a trail-runner, Wilson added, “It was a dream to be at the base of the mountain.”

Scaling back

Once settled in Huntington, Wilson found himself baking more this summer than he’d hoped to supply demand from the Burlington Farmers Market and key retail customers.

Miller, his first baking teacher, continues to influence him, Wilson said, “not just on technique but as an example of making the bakery fit his life. He scaled back to do that.”

Heading into fall, Wilson followed his mentor’s path and cut back to one weekly bake cycle, producing 450-500 loaves rather than the 750 he was baking this summer.

“One of my big intentions was to go deep, to really focus on the bread, the technique,” Wilson explained. “I want to get to the point where I’m mostly thinking about the bread.”

Running Stone offers rectangular pan loaves baked in a traditional bread pan and round hearth loaves baked directly on the floor, or hearth, of the oven.

“The heart of what I bake is traditional German-style breads,” he explained, toasting a few samples in a small skillet.

Wilson uses all freshly milled flour and a natural sourdough starter. It is labor-intensive and he prefers to do it alone.

“I like to actually shape every loaf,” he said. “Part of why I like to work alone is that I can give it 110 percent focus. I totally geek out on the efficiency of it. I’m a perfectionist.”

The breads made with a large proportion of whole-grain rye are his favorites. Many are flavored with a blend of whole coriander, fennel, caraway and anise seeds ground with the flour. They bear no resemblance to pale deli rye speckled with seeds.

The seeded German dark even uses a traditional technique that calls for almost black, oven-toasted slices of previous week’s loaves run through a hand-cranked meat grinder and then milled with the grain.

“I love the blend of technical details and feel,” Wilson said. “There are so many variables: the wood, air humidity and temperature, the dough. I can be endlessly entertained managing those variables. It doesn’t ever get boring.”

This summer, the baker even developed a loaf made without gluten. Although it is very different from his core breads, Wilson said it surprised him how much he liked it and it has attracted lots of interest at the farmers market.

Milling his own

While Wilson talked on Wednesday morning, he paused every so often to listen for sounds of progress from the small mill room partitioned off at the far end of the container where an electric mill was grinding Wapsie Valley heirloom corn from Nitty Gritty Grain Company of Charlotte.

Later that day, he would run 250 pounds of whole rye through the same mill, which he estimated would take about seven hours.

Every other week, Wilson drives to Elmore Mountain Bread, another Vermont bakery that mills its own flour, to pick up freshly milled wheat flour. That will soon change when Elmore Mountain co-owner Andrew Heyn completes a custom 26-inch stone mill for Running Stone Bread.

The new mill will enable Wilson to source all of his grain direct from farmers and grind it fresh on-site.

Surveying the tightly packed production container, Wilson said, “I’m not quite sure how it will all fit. I will probably get another 20-foot shipping container.”

Contact Melissa Pasanen at mpasanen@aol.com and follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TasteofVermont

For more information:

Running Stone Bread will be at the remaining outdoor Burlington Farmers Markets through the end of October. Bread is also available through a variety of independent food markets, general stores, co-ops and farmstands. Go to runningstonebread.com or email runningstonebread@gmail.com for current lists and days of delivery.