Mom's Birthday Present

"...yesterday we built our oven. It has a lot of layers and took us all day but it worked!..."

"...This one holds heat better than I would have thought. It is still warm in the mornings. The first fire we got the temp up more than 900 degrees which is not good but it was our first fire. The front of the oven, just behind the opening, stays about 500 degrees as long as we have fire in back and then cools to about 400 and we do most of the cooking then. Last night after 3 hours it was still 350 degrees right there..."



"The reason we did not insulate more is that the oven is not where we want the oven to be forever. You might be able to see the grape vines behind the oven. That is where the final oven will be. We have to move the grapes to a trellis behind the house, then dig a deep footing and then build the final dream oven.

Our Oven Layers:

1. 3 rows of cement block with brick and stone pieces stuffed in every hole

2. A solid layer of cement block

3. cheap salvaged brick with holes but we put the holes inside

4. a layer of fire brick but we did not like it and so we did not use it for the floor but we used it for insulation

5. a layer of nice fire brick that we bought and this is the floor of the oven

6. then we used metal pieces that are for fire places brick and we used those to hold up the roof

7. we just stacked up all the salvaged fire brick we could find and then we put more old brick on the outside of that

8. we used up all the fire brick for the roof"

" Last night we baked Ciabatta (bread), pizza, salmon and vegetables. Tonight we cooked eggplants with garlic and tomato, more Ciabatta, s'mores, caramalized peaches and more vegetables. The oven was my for our Mom's birthday and she was very excited..."

"Our Mom loves the oven, neighbors came to see it and we are happy with it as a temporary oven. One neighbor who came to see it spent $2,600. to buy a cement looking shell dome from a place in California, then they have spent $1,000 for stone and they have worked on their oven for 4 months now and it still is not finished! We only spent about $175.00 for cement block and new fire bricks since we salvaged the rest and our oven was working the first day!
We think that is funny."