Pre-election Bake.

Waiting for tomorrow's outcome has me nervous. Gotta keep busy...


Figured I could get caught up on my blog. Been baking bread a couple times a month. Oven works great, but still learning its pattern.

Today I baked 18 pounds of dough made up into 11 loaves. The dough was phenomenal. The oven was a little too hot, but not extreme. Getting the timing on when to fire, when to clean out, etc. in sinc with the dough seems to be the trick, but I'm ok with darker bread some weeks.

So here's the formula:
10# flour
8# water at about 65F
90 g salt
45 g dry yeast

Pre-heat oven: about 3 hours of fire the night before(great time to make flatbread)
Mix at 8:00 PM night before, mix until fairly lumpless, don't bother with kneading
Start fire 7:45am
Pour onto table 8:00am, fold well, then fold about every 15 minutes til about 10.
Divide and preshape about 10
Spread remaining coals from fire across hearth
Shape onto cloth or into bowls 10:30
Clean oven & mop an hour before baking.
Load into oven about 11:30 or 12:00

Today's bake took 15 minutes! Bread has a thin crust, moist and open crumb, great taste.

Time to put in the Granola.

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.

Thermal Break

In order to hold the heat in, an insulating layer is applied to the oven. This forms a thermal
break between the outside and the inside. The 4" of dense dry mud absorbs heat from the fire and then gives it back. By insulating it, that heat goes more into the oven than out into the atmosphere. I used two different mixes for insulating. One was with a coarse sawdust and high clay content soil mix. The other was our regular mud mix and lots of straw.Notice the bottle on the right side of the oven; the arch insulating layer is continuous with the insulation layer under the hearth encasing the whole oven.