First Bread

So we made a small batch of bread yesterday. Fired, then immediately baked. The oven held its temperature a little longer, but still not up to speed. These baguettes baked in about 14 minutes I think. They baked a little too fast, but were incredible with butter and marmalade. More like pastry.

Just gotta keep firing it and dry it out a little more. Then we can start really baking. Rye breads and granola... and maybe we can roast coffee!!

First Bake

The oven burns real nice. I seem to have gotten door size and arch just right. We're still drying out all the layers of material, so it's not holding heat yet. But it sure produces incredible wood fired pizza!

Protection for my Wood Fired Oven

I figured that it might rain in a day or two, so I got a bunch of used lumber and put a roof over my oven. I missed a deal on some job left-overs for the shingles by a day, so I went and bought new ones. The 2 x 8 was "used" and I got it for 2 bucks. The posts are from a cedar that was growing too close to the house. So the whole roof including the stove pipe and pipe collar cost about $90.

Final Layer of Mud

The final layer was made from the same mix as the arch core, but with the addition of straw. The final layer went pretty quick. It was only 1 - 1 1/2 inches thick. More like a thick plaster. Plus with the straw in it, it seemed OK to put it on a little wetter.

Once it dried a bit, we smoothed it out by rubbing it with a board. Now we just have to let it dry a bit, put some fires in it to burn out the forms, let it dry some more... and soon we'll be baking great bread.

Chimney

While the insulating layer was going on, I made a couple of custom adobe chimney blocks. Once these had hardened a bit, I extended the chimney base up about 10 inches. The blocks were molded before I had the straw on site so I mixed sawdust into the mud to reduce cracking. But I had the straw when I laid them up, so that's what you see in the mud "mortar".





Once the block was in place, I plastered it smooth. The first part of the oven to be in a finished state. I was elated at this point. My past experiences with oven chimney building had put me in a very reluctant state about this part of the process. But this chimney was a breeze to design and build.









Here it is shown with about one third of the oven having it's final mud layer.


















Next I made up several adobe bricks to finish the chimney top. It was sunny, so I only had to wait about 30 hours for them to firm up nicely. Then I made an arch over the chimney, filled in the front face, but left it open on the back to accommodate a stove pipe.