Earth Oven, Phase 11: Pizza

Today we fired up the oven again and made pizza. We just wanted pizza so didn’t add the rocket stove to the mix for baking. We found a good routine that doesn’t involve rushing. We burned a small fire for about 45 minutes, which was sufficient to bring the baking stone up to 850F: perfect …

Earth Oven Phase 9: Rebuild, Better

We demolished the Earth Oven because the inner earth layer was dropping too much dust and too many chunks into the food – we dubbed that “mushroom and mineral pizza”. There wasn’t enough clay in the mixture: too much sand. We saved and kept separate the two layers, bought 50 lbs moist potter’s clay and …

Earth Oven, Phase 7: Patching up, and Pizza

The Earth Oven series: foundation base hearth thermal mass first drying fire and door arch insulating layer and chimney Patching up, and first pizza! The oven mud could have been more clay-ey, but most of the oven has held up well. Not so the part that wasn’t as compacted (it being over the 0pening)  and …

Gorgeous Day for Baking Cookies

“Mama, can we bake cookies?” Because I suspected that the oven is still too wet to retain enough heat, we put the cookie tray right on the coals (which is cheating, really). The thermometer went up to 400 and then freaked out.   Cookies came out a little burned but nice and smoky! Steam rising …

Earth Oven, Phase 6: Insulating Layer and Chimney

The Earth Oven series: foundation base hearth thermal mass first drying fire and door arch insulating layer and chimney Patching up, and first pizza! Advice for the novice bricklayer: when building an arch, when done, remove supports and then let cement dry. You guessed it, when removing the supports under my hastily built arch, the …

Earth Oven, Phase 5: First Drying Fire and Door Arch

The Earth Oven series: foundation base hearth thermal mass first drying fire and door arch insulating layer and chimney Patching up, and first pizza! Today we dug out the sand form. We peeled off the newspaper and checked out the surface on the inside. It’s pretty smooth. After that, we lit a fire, just a small …