After several years of baking in North House Folk School's wood-fired brick oven, I decided to build an oven of my own. I went a little crazy with extra features (slab foundation, arches, ash dump, chimney, doors, wood storage) and decorations (limestone around the foundation), but you can make a very usable version in a weekend with salvaged materials and a couple of friends.
The place to start is Kiko Denzer's "Build Your Own Earth Oven".
I also made extensive use of Daniel Wing and Alan Scott's "The Bread Builders", which is a great resource even if you're baking bread in a regular electric oven.
The place to start is Kiko Denzer's "Build Your Own Earth Oven".
I also made extensive use of Daniel Wing and Alan Scott's "The Bread Builders", which is a great resource even if you're baking bread in a regular electric oven.
Remove these ads by
Signing UpStep 1: Bushwhacking, Lumberjacking and Limestoning
We have a big lawn next to the neighboring farmer's field, with a great view of Carleton College's wind turbine. What a great place for a pizza party!
The most obvious place to put the oven was in line with our garden shed, but the whole area was a dense jungle. I spent a day with our Stihl brushcutter, with a saw blade in place of the string trimmer. That thing would be awesome for fighting zombies!
I had to chainsaw out a medium-sized box elder tree as well.
Under all that jungle, I discovered an improbable trove of cut limestone left over from when they built our house in 1973. Too good! I'll use that for the keystone and the stone veneer around the foundation.
The most obvious place to put the oven was in line with our garden shed, but the whole area was a dense jungle. I spent a day with our Stihl brushcutter, with a saw blade in place of the string trimmer. That thing would be awesome for fighting zombies!
I had to chainsaw out a medium-sized box elder tree as well.
Under all that jungle, I discovered an improbable trove of cut limestone left over from when they built our house in 1973. Too good! I'll use that for the keystone and the stone veneer around the foundation.
Visit Our Store »
Go Pro Today »
My questions for you:
What did you encounter during your building that you think would be good for first timers to know? (I plan on getting Kiko's book)
How long did this take, from first breaking terra firma to cooked pizza?
mass is WAY too much. An inch would be more like it (though you'll have to use your judgment anout fragility vs thickness. 4" takes FOREVER to heat.
Building the foundation, block frame, steel frame and arches took all the time. If you build Denzer's basic version instead it will go together like magic. I wanted the fancy extra options, but they took 80% of the effort.
But the main things I'd have done differently are less thermal mass and a permanent weatherproof roof. Tarps shred and blow loose all the time.
I've been doing some drafting in google sketch up. I was planning on making it under a lean-to on the side of our barn, good deal of shelter.
I want to post the memories about the construction I wrote on our blog.
http://estampaverde.blogspot.com/2010/04/fiat-panis-o-de-como-hacer-un-horno-de.html
Its in spanish, but anyways... I might try the wood door because there isn't any metal workers around!!! Any advice on baking??? How long shall I leave the oven to dry before starting a big fire???
(Pardon my English. I speak German and Chinese but very little Spanish, even though I could use Spanish every day in my own town if I had more time to put toward it...)
That oven is beautiful!
I don't know how long to let it try. Mine is cracked on the inside but is still holding together. I don't know whether it would have cracked less if I had let it try more???
Certainly the first couple of firings will eat a LOT of fuel as the fire burns out the remaining moisture. You'll want to start three or four hours before you cook. Once the dome dries out it will take more like 90 minutes.
When you first start the fire, the oven ceiling will turn black from smoke. It will stay black until the dome surface temperature hits around 530DegC. Then the smoke will burn off and you will see clean clay. In my oven (which I built too thick, I think) I keep firing for about 30 minutes after the clay burns clean.
When I bake pizza, I leave all the coals in the oven and just push them to one side. You may need to keep feeding skinny sticks onto the coals so you get some radiant heat from the flames to brown the top of the pizzas.
If I'm baking other things, I shovel the coals out, mop the floor, and then use the 'ouch' test to test temperature.
At pizza temperature (375-475DegC), I can't put my hand into the oven at all.
At bread-baking/meat and fish roasting temperature, I can count to three until I have to jerk my hand out.
Much longer than three and the oven is colder than I use for much of anything except beans and stews.
Ask me more questions any time. I love to talk about baking!
-Fritz
Second, I was wondering if you thought of using the bottom area as a bbq smoker, with a tad of alteration I suppose
Kevin
Buffalo, NY
The Denzer book (which you should buy because it's great) suggests making a door out of adobe or wood. You may need to soak a wooden door in water for a few hours before using it so it doesn't scorch too badly and so it contributes some steam. Anything would work though, really. A stone or concrete paver if it's not too heavy?
As far as metalwork goes: I usually find that the most fun part of any project is hunting around my county for people who know the trades I'm missing and hiring/befriending them. You meet new people and learn a lot, and it expands your sense of what you and your growing crew can build next time.
You can totally use the oven as a barbecue pit. Just keep a slow fire going off to one side and throw some soaked chips on the fire from time to time.
It's fashionable among molecular gastronomes and Make Magazine readers to use a computer-controlled blower to keep the pit's internal temperature as stable as possible. <a href="http://www.mikezed.com/">Mikezed</a>, whom I met at Maker Faire SF 2008, encouraged me to try that with a cob oven. I haven't gotten around to it, but perhaps you could pave the way?
-Fritz
(Image CC-BY-NC-ND by kathryn_goddard1)
For pizza and casual loaf-bread baking 2 1/2-3 inches should be just lovely.
My dome has lots of cracks and it holds more heat than I can use. (I used mud straight out of Chris's yard and didn't measure or test a thing except to observe that the mud was sticky.) If you were using the dome as a cooking surface (tandoor) you would care, or if you needed maximum heat storage that was very reliable (like for subsistence or commercial use) you would care. Otherwise you don't care.
If you are a perfectionist (which I'm not but which I can respect) then you should probably hit up The Fresh Loaf or try to bounce an e-mail off Kiko (I don't have good contact info for him but you could try phoning North House and leaving a message for him. (He's teaching up there right now.))
Where are you located? Maybe we should organize a couple of bake days.
The string is the cable of a thermocouple type XCIB-K-1-1-10 from Omega http://www.omega.com/pptst/XCIB.html. The thermocouple unction is cemented inside a hole drilled halfway through one of the hearth bricks. In the process of threading the cable down through all the thermal mass and insulation, I seem to have damaged it somehow: as far as I can tell from the meter I seem to have a short somewhere in the cable. Omega's tech support is SUPER helpful, so I'm sure they could talk me through a fix or a replacement if I engaged with the problem. The Wing/Scott book talks about how to use thermocouples and meters. The Denzer book just has you use medieval techniques like browning flour, browning paper and sticking your bare hand in and counting. I've been using the bare hand test and it works well and I haven't gotten hurt. I'll fix the thermocouple eventually.
In my case, I drove all over the county with my geologist-turned-architect brother-in-law (the one in the photos). We went to every ditch and gravel pit and excavator's dump we could find and he told me about the geological history and chemical makeup of the soil. We couldn't find enough clay anywhere.
I gave up.
Then Chris called and said that he was doing some excavating and the subsoil he was hitting was sandy and goopy and stuck to everything. Right on!
I just used that stuff raw.
So, um (and bearing in mind that my kids and I did this with a competely naive, playful attitude of "does this feel right?" "nah, spray the hose in there some more.")
Woodchip dough: Take clayey subsoil and mix it with water till it's the texture of heavy cream. Then have a kid mix that with pea-sized woodchips until you can make balls with it: Not so dry that it's powdery; not so wet that it's runny.
Thermal mass and oven dome: Take clayey subsoil and mix it with water till it's the texture of the clay you used to make coil pots in art class. Maybe a little soggier.
Popcorn balls: Same as for woodchip dough except use pea-sized perlite or vermiculite ("Micaflake" brand, in my case) instead of woodchips.
Adobe: Arrange a barter deal with the students at Farmhouse so you get half a bale of rotten straw in return for a pizza-promissory note. Then dump fistfuls of straw into some soppy mud until the mixture is fun to play with. Then mash that into shape and smooth it down with the palms of your hands until you are completely at peace. (Check out the book Built by Hand for brilliant houses, mosques, etc. built this way.)
Mud mortar: Take clayey subsoil and mix it with water till it's the texture of mortar.
You get the picture.