jonah has named the new oven, BIG HOT! and boy, do i know why. she's big, she's hot and she bakes like you wouldn't believe. I'm envisioning making bread, pizza, roast veg and meat, yogurt, fruit leather, nuts, whatever. maybe one day a week, i will become simply a baker, preparing food all day, wearing a dress and an apron smeared with flour and soot. like an old school village baker from sicily, but perhaps i've had a glass of wine and am taking it a bit too far. ahem. for those of you who are wondering, the oven sits on a hollow base made from reclaimed sidewalk pieces (urbanite), filled with rubble and mortared with cob. The brick baking floor sits in a bed of sand. the first 4 inches of the oven is clay and sand and the next 4 inches is clay, sand, straw. on top of this thermal layer is an insulative layer of perlite and clay followed by a couple of clay/sand/horse manure plasters.
we've already had several fabulous pizza nights where one by one our friends emphatically swore their life long allegiance to the wood fired oven. My first bread baking resulted in 4 hot crossed buns, in other words, inedible lumps of char. My second bread baking was better but not great. There is much to be learned here, much to experiment with. How long to fire the oven, how to prepare the dough, what to wear whilst cooking, how do i prevent the wooden door from catching on fire, why is jonah determined to cook tree bark in the oven? stay tuned for more tasty results from BIG HOT!!!
