Heat retained in several tonnes of sand was once part of a bread-making method popular in the 1800s in country Australia.

Now an oven that stands tall in the back yard of a house in the main street of Adelong, in southern New South Wales, is again turning out loaves in what was once a common form of baking.

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Scotch ovens were once spread throughout regional towns.

However, as industrialisation took hold, factories designed to churn out mass-produced bread took over.

Many of the Scotch ovens fell into disrepair or were incorporated as something else in the building that housed them, which was the case of the Adelong oven when John Rose and his wife Jane came across it.

When they found it, it had been covered in a bright shiny blue acrylic paint as part of a feature for a previous owner.

Mr Rose had been in marketing in Sydney and also worked as a senior bureaucrat.

However, he longed to be able to be up to his elbows in flour and dough.

Once taken from the Scotch oven, John Rose checks each loaf. ( ABC Rural: Michael Cavanagh )

To achieve this aim, along with purchasing the oven and the land it was on, he travelled to San Fransisco.

To many it is the home of the sour dough loaf.

Returning armed with bread-making skills, the couple restored the baking chamber made of bricks, which has several tonnes of sand encasing it.

This all stands inside a stone building that could easily house a car.

"It is a massive structure. It has very thick walls. It has two tonnes of sand below, two tonnes of sand above," Mr Rose said.

"The oven itself forms a thermal mass. It is held together by metal tie rods which are secured by large railway sleeper-type logs for reinforcement."

Temperature builds up over three days

Inside the building is an oven that resembles many that are used by restaurants to make wood-fired pizzas.

The difference is that there is no flame or red hot coals inside the oven used to bake his Stella Rossa loaves of bread.

To the right of the cast iron oven door, which measures about a square metre, is a firebox.

Running from the firebox through the sand to the other side of the oven is a flue.

"From zero temperature I need to run the oven for around three days to build a quantity of heat into that oven, into those bricks, into that sand," Mr Rose said.

"The sand absorbs the heat from my fire and then feeds that heat back in when I kill my fire to bake 300 or so loaves of bread.

"As I load bread and unload bread I lose heat from my oven. The stored heat will come out of the sand and the bricks to keep the chamber at a baking temperature."

The oven is usually fired to about 380 degrees, and then Mr Rose lets it slowly subside to his baking temperature of about 250 degrees.

It takes about 10 hours of burning stringy bark or box wood to reach the maximum temperature.

Steel pins secured by railway-type wooden sleepers hold the brick walls that encase four tonnes of sand of a Scotch bread oven. ( ABC Rural: Michael Cavanagh )

The fire is then killed to enable the oven to "calm down", which takes about two hours, and it is ready for the loaves of dough to be loaded into the dome-like chamber.

Hand-made bread passes taste test

Many devotees claim they can taste the difference when comparing mass-produced bread to what emerges from Mr Rose's oven.

"The entire process, I am forcing myself to go through in hand shaping all my bread, hand loading into an oven that has been fired by wood that I have cut and loaded myself," he said.

"This is part of the process of putting into that bread that otherwise would not be there.

"You can buy bread now in a shop or supermarket that has been hardly touched by human hands.

"That is a remarkable technological achievement, but as far as my customers are concerned it has lost something, mainly flavour, taste and goodness."

Mr Rose said his three basic ingredients were flour which he purchased from a mill in north western New South Wales, water and salt.

"If it has more than five ingredients, don't buy it," he said.

When it comes to eating bread, Mr Rose recommends "definitely don't eat it hot. It should be cooled to room temperature before contemplating slicing it".

Given the time and effort put into each loaf, Mr Rose is sanguine that it could be demolished so quickly after being ready.

"It's just making bread. If that bread disappears at breakfast in five minutes, that is because people enjoy it. I'll make another one for them," he said.