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  

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