Purchased Clay

 mixing clay

Recently I have completed an earth oven that was made with clay purchased from a pottery supply store. The clay was extremely easy to work with. We mixed it with a hoe, one part clay with three parts sand in a wheel barrow and it was much, much easier that stomping the clay to smithereens with one's feet. The cost of the clay was minimal ($30.00) and the consistency was excellent. Building a circular oven with a 31" floor diameter, 15" dome height, 4" thick walls, we used about 125 pounds of clay. The type of clay we used was  fireclay (Hawthorne 40 mesh). If you happen to live in Maine, you can buy it in Portland. However, with kids present, you might want them to do the barefoot-in-the-mud dance.

stomping clay

from Bread Earth and Fire

 THE EARTH OVEN con't

 

Assuming you don’t have to buy any tools for the job, the cost of materials is relatively small considering what you’ll be getting. Abbott and Nancy spent about $250.00 on materials. Labor was free.No matter how careful and neat you are, expect the area where you’ll be doing your work to look like a construction site because that’s what it will be. Don’t leave nails sticking up in boards, and don’t leave tools on the ground where someone could step on them. Always think about your safety and the safety of others. Spread a couple of your tarps.After deciding on a spot for your oven, stake out the area. You’ll be pouring a concrete slab, 48 X 48 inches, but the area you stake out should be at least a foot bigger all the way around, or 60 X 60 inches because you need to give yourself some wiggle room. Now start digging. Abbott and Nancy dug down about one foot, and that seemed about right. Place the sod and topsoil in a pile away from the construction site, or it will just get in your way. However, save it because it’s alive, rich in nutrients, and after the sods decompose, you can shovel what remains into your garden or place around shrubbery. Fill your excavation with enough gravel so that when you pour your slab, it will be as high as your own mowed lawn (if you have one) or higher. You don’t want your slab to be underground.
to be continued

Name Change

I just changed the name of this blog to:
http://ibreadhunter.blogspot.com/
I thought it would be easier for me to remember.
Stu

Mud and Foil

 successively layers of overlapping foil being applied

Here's a photo of an oven I worked on this past weekend. The baker does not want a cover over the oven, and this presents a real problem in protecting it from the elements. An unprotected mud oven in the northeast might disintegrate rather quickly so we decided to wrap the mud dome with aluminum foil. Any water that got to the foil would theoretically just drain down the side. Perhaps over the insulation we'll wrap the oven with another layer of foil become applying the stucco. There are some who say an oven needs to "breath," but after a mud oven has been fired to 1,000 degrees F., the dome becomes rock hard and the ability to breath seems to be a moot point.
There will definitely be an update on this oven.

from Bread Earth and Fire (The Earth Oven)

 baking in the rain

The Earth Oven (con't)

Let’s assume the oven you’re going to construct will be for home use, and you are definitely not going to operate a bakery. If you construct a very large oven, it will be a waste of space, materials, and use too much firewood to heat up. A large oven will also take longer to build and contribute unnecessarily to global degradation. You won’t need the Taj Mahal of ovens. However, an oven that’s too small will be difficult to maneuver pizzas and breads. The Meaders decided on a circular oven with a 22.5-inch floor diameter.

For the purposes of this book, when I refer to the floor, hearth or deck, I am referring to the same place. It is there where your breads sit to bake.

We felt this would be a good size for pizzas as well as breads, but I don’t think you should build anything smaller than this. An oven this size will easily bake four loaves of bread or one or two pizzas at a time, although I personally like baking one pizza at a time. Baking pizzas and breads are always done separately. A pizza should take less than three minutes to cook, and with some help, you can crank out enough pizzas so your garden party of twenty folks will have no reason to complain.

Now we were ready to come up with a supply list, but when you do your oven, it’s not necessary to have all the materials on hand, although it does help.

You can buy most of the materials you’ll need at Big Box, but they won’t have clay, perlite, firebricks, straw, and sawdust. The firebricks are easily found at a masonry supply store. The Perlite and straw you will find at a garden supply store, and the sawdust you can get free from someone who does woodworking. You might find Perlite at big box, but if you do, it will probably be packaged in small bags, and it will be very expensive. It will be much more economical to buy Perlite in large bags. Vermiculite is a similar insulator, and if you can’t find Perlite, than use vermiculite; they are quite similar. Clay can be dug for free if you know where to look, or it can be purchased from a pottery supply store...

to be continued

from Bread Earth and Fire (The Earth Oven)

     The Earth Oven

 
     Abbott, aged 72 is an artist, 16 mm filmmaker and art professor. Nancy, aged 70 is a potter and French teacher. Working with them was a rewarding experience for me. They really are living proof that numbers don’t add up to anything. Senior citizens? What’s that? None around here. And there were no testosterone-charged young men to move 80 pound bags of concrete mix (although that would have helped), nor did anyone help them get the rocks up the hill to the building site. They did it all themselves with just a little help from me, and they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2008.      Every step in the process, every peek around the corner was an adventure for them because they had never done this before. “Please don’t do anything until I get back,” was a common refrain if someone had to run an errand. When the job was finished and the first rustic pizza was taken from the blazing oven, we all had to laugh considering what everyone went through to get to that final stage, but of course it was all worth it.      After the initial decision had been made to construct an earth oven, they had to decide where it should go. The size of the footprint is not really that much different between a small and large oven so the choice of location will remain the same. We’ll only be talking about outdoor locations because constructing an oven indoors poses some challenges that are beyond the scope of this book. Abbott and Nancy wanted an oven that would be close to their home, visible from the deck, but not pose a fire hazard. Although the oven would be raised off the ground, we still wanted to find a well-drained location because here in New England, frost in the ground could cause the oven to heave up in the spring and create some real problems, such as cracking and shifting the oven off level. Even after finding what we felt would be the best location, we would still dig down below grade for as least one foot and fill the space with gravel.

     The theory was that if any water did get in under the oven, the gravel would allow it to drain, and there would be no or very little freezing under the oven. If you were totally fanatical about preventing frost problems, then you would have to dig a hole about two feet deep, fill it with gravel and then lay in rigid foam insulation that extended six inches beyond the perimeter of the oven base. A slab would then be poured right on the foam. Or you could excavate a hole below the frost line that could be four feet deep and fill that with gravel. There was no way we would follow these alternative paths. We were willing to take our chances with the least demanding approach, and you should be able to as well. We simply dug a hole, filled it with gravel and then poured our slab.

That said, to really cover all your bases, I think it would be a good idea to get some advice from a local masonry contractor. Simply visit a masonry supply store and inquire. From my experience, folks really want to help out. Have a photo of the type of oven you’re planning to build so the person you’re talking to can relate it to your project.      If you are fortunate enough to live in an area where the ground does not freeze, is solid and has good drainage, then all you’ll have to do is level the surface and pour your pad, but more about that later. In fact, depending on the type of oven base you’d like to have, you might not even need to pour a pad.to be continued

from Bread Earth and Fire (The Earth Oven)

 searching for the perfect oven spot

Chapter 1

THE EARTH OVEN

Building the earth oven has been adapted from my book “Earth Oven Adventure.” It is the story about Abbott and Nancy Meader who built an oven in their backyard. Although they had some assistance from friends and me, Abbott and Nancy really did the bulk of the work. And there was a lot of work involved. If you can’t or don’t like moving heavy materials around, then you shouldn’t be building this type of oven. Of course you could always have someone build it for you or help you with it, but if you personally get involved in the physical part of the process, I believe you'll have a greater appreciation for your earth oven. You don’t have to be a mason or someone with special skills. All it takes is desire and not minding the mud you’ll have on your hands. You can use this section of Bread Earth and Fire as a template for constructing your own earth oven. All the information you’ll need will be right here for a 22 1/2 inch hearth diameter oven. I’ve chosen this size because I’ve already made some ovens with this hearth diameter, and they’ve worked out really well. If you want to change the dimensions, then your material quantities will change accordingly, but the basic principals remain the same. Consider reading Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer. He more than anyone else made this low-cost method of oven construction available to everyone.
to be continued

Bread Earth and Fire (back cover)

Here's a photo of the back cover of Bread Earth and Fire. This will most likely change, but this is what I have for now.

Bread Earth and Fire/Introduction

INTRODUCTION

One reason I love to bake bread is because each bread is different, an adventure in itself. Where the commercial baker has to strive for uniformity and consistency of product, that won’t have to be your concern or mine. We can be free to explore and innovate, and there’s no need for our loaves to have the appearance of being cloned from a previous loaf.

As an amateur baker, I thought that simply baking would be enough to keep me occupied, but never did I realize that baking outdoors in a wood-fired oven would provide even greater satisfaction than baking indoors in a conventional oven would, but it did. Not only was I baking bread to share, but also firing up the oven during all four seasons added a totally new dimension. Here I was, baking in a manner that has not changed in millennia, a phenomenon most appealing to me. If you enjoy baking bread or would like to learn how, and if constructing your own wood-fired oven interests you, then you should find lots of useful information here. I don’t pretend to be an expert in any of the areas I discuss, truly, I am an amateur. However, because of the pleasures I’ve discovered in bread baking and oven building, I want to share my experiences with you.                                                 

We’ll be looking at three very different ovens, and yet in some ways, quite similar. One oven is constructed with mud and the others with brick. The brick ovens take less time to construct than the mud oven, but the materials cost a little more. Each oven fires with wood and the ovens have an incredible capacity to produce unspeakably wonderful breads and pizzas. If they don’t, then you’re doing something wrong, but I’m going to work with you as best I can to help you get it right. The third oven is for flat breads only because there really isn’t enough mass to retain very much heat.

No, you don’t have to be a mason to build the ovens I am going to describe. Just rudimentary construction skills coupled with desire will suffice. I’m definitely not a mason and most masons would probably smile at my lack of skill with the trowels, but my gloved hands get the job done quite well.

You could always choose to have an oven built for you or buy an imported, prefab oven. If you decide to do this, then expect to spend some real money, but you’ll be guaranteed a very fine oven, indeed. In the resources section at the end of the book, I’ll make a couple of recommendations. However, a simple oven you can construct yourself will bake just as well, at a cost of perhaps a few hundred dollars.

To become good at baking, you have to bake a lot and really understand some basic principles. We’ll look in detail at the basic principles, but don’t get discouraged if some of your breads don’t exactly rise to your expectations. Expect some failures, but you’ll learn from them. Our focus will be sourdough breads, raised and flat, but we’ll also be making no-knead breads using a very small amount of active dry yeast.

If the weather in the winter simply becomes too overwhelming, too many snowdrifts to surmount, and your firewood is somehow lost under the snow bank, then you’ll be able to stay in the house and bake breads in your conventional oven. Yes, it’s okay to be the baker who came in from the cold. An indoor technique I employ is baking undercover, and I believe you’ll find the breads made this way can equal and even surpass the breads you make in your outdoor wood-fired oven. What you gain by baking indoors is control. But lots more about this later on. What we won’t be baking indoors is pizza. Pizzas need to be baked on the hearth of a wood-fired oven where the floor temperature is between 600-700 degrees Fahrenheit. You simply can’t attain these temperatures in a conventional oven, but if you have an indoor, wood-fired oven, then no problem. A bake stone in a conventional oven helps, but it’s only a compromise. Most important, however, pizzas need to be kissed by fire. It is the fire that gives pizza that rustic quality. So, for great breads and pizzas, I guess you’ll just have to build a wood-fired oven.

Bread Earth and Fire

Bread Earth and Fire is the title of a book I've been working on. I'm going to post unedited selections and any comments would be most welcome.

CONTENTS

Introduction 

CHAPTER ONE           Three ovens, Nonoven, Oven doors

CHAPTER TWO         Sourdough bread baking, flour, how to build a fire, sourdough starter

CHAPTER THREE   Flat breads                                                                                                                                                                       

How to make: pizza, earth oven bagels, bialys, onion bread superieur, zatar bread, pita bread, Molunkan fire bread, Tex-Mex tortillas, journey cakes

CHAPTER FOUR      Baking with instant yeast (no-knead) slow process

CHAPTER FIVE       Dough in a few hours

CHAPTER SIX          Coming in from the cold/baking undercover

CHAPTER SEVEN     Keeping Bread

Photo gallery

Resources