Oven.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

This page really wasn’t created to be an oven build blog, it’s meant to be just another generic food blog, this time with an emphasis on brick ovens, but this build was a pretty (the most?) important step in my journey to amateur baking. Why would a kid who had never baked pizza or a single loaf of bread in his life decide to build a brick oven in his backyard? I don’t really know, but I did. The idea hit me sometime in Summer ‘07, in San Antonio with a friend. My thought process couldn’t have been much more complex that this: “I like bread, I like pizza, I like to build things, brick ovens are cool.” Seriously, that’s it; the build began. My dad owns the house in College Station, TX that my roommates and I live in, and apparently he bought the idea that an oven, constructed by someone who had never touched a brick, would be a good addition to a perfectly good backyard. Well, my sales pitch worked, and I couldn’t have done this without funding from my parents, so thank you.

In the beginning, cost was priority, and in a few months an oven came together. It was ugly, it didn’t hold any heat, and smoke billowed from the opening, ready to send tears streaming from any eye foolish enough to get too close. 12 months later I tore the oven chamber down.

Now I had a foundation, a base, a hearth slab, and some loose fire bricks salvaged from the first way, and it was time to build Oven 2.0. In Summer ‘08 the new oven was constructed. This time, using ideas from Villagok, Rado Hands site, and Ozark Dreams, I used all firebricks, and in my opinion did everything right. It worked. We can cook pizza for as long as we want, breads for hours after a firing, and roasted Cornish game hens after that (they literally fall apart when pulled off the hearth… beautiful). The Oven hasn’t been fired in a few weeks, and it’s been whispering in my ear that it’s time, that it needs to be cooked in. Soon.




Posted by Growing Dallas at 1:01 PM 0 comments  

Moved from Tumblr...

Just testing out this whole “blogging” thing; apparently it’s what hip people do. I’m pretty certain it’s on Stuff White People Like, or it will be there soon.

I’ve never imagined that I have anything going on that is even remotely interesting enough to blog about, and being a mediocre-at-best writer, well, you see where my problem lies. Then I discovered the world of food blogs, and my eyes were opened. I like food, I like the intranets, so why can’t they come together in tasty harmony right at my computer? Unfortunately, one has to write somewhere above a third grade competency to even blog about something as common as food. I was blogless, and forever blogless I would stay. I went on, floating through the blogosphere, yearning for that idea that would catapult my internet writing career, and then it hit me. I do have something uncommon to write about, that will interest readers, that will, God willing, take their thoughts away from my lackluster writing. I have a wood-fired brick oven, made by yours truly! So please, focus on the pizza, the bread, the paella, the oven. Whatever you do, don’t focus on the writing. Let the blogging begin!

Posted by Growing Dallas at 12:48 PM 0 comments  

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