Does anyone have experience baking with an Alan Scott wood fired oven?  Starting this Fall I'll be baking using one and my experience so far is limited to baking in commercial gas ovens.

Any personal experience or book suggestions would be appreciated.  I'm less interested in construction details, and more in the process of using one and what major differences to expect from my experience with gas (I'm baking with a small 4-deck Italian oven presently).

Thanks!

Larry

Over the holidays my husband has been trying to increase his carbon footprint by leaps and bounds.  This time of year is quiet for us, we own an A/C and heating company in Texas.  So summers are crazy and winters allow us some time to play.  Our big new toy has been the wood fire oven.  I didn't realize how into cooking in it my husband would become.  I swear he has decimated the chicken population around here in recent weeks and I have made more bread than I could really give away.  I am waiting for my neighbors to not look me in the eye and try to run whenever they see me coming with anything in my arms.  I actually had one guy down the street, who I have never met really, almost turn down a chicken from us.  I guess I would be suspicious of someone handing out chickens I didn't know.  As you can see, I am getting desperate for takers.  Last night as I was trying to get ride of 3 of the 6 loaves we baked yesterday, which is what I got on here to write about in the first place, I gave them to friends of our neighbors who just happened to be leaving the neighbors house when I walked out the door.  Don't know them either.  It was rather funny.  I asked them if they would like a loaf of bread.  One of the guys replies, "Umm, we have a loaf at home thank you."  I told him it was homemade and baked in a wood fire oven and he gave in.  I didn't wait to hear what the second guy had to say, I just shoved the bread in his hands and knocked on the neighbor's door.  I am sure people are somewhere thinking I am very strange indeed.  So I need to find a soup kitchen or something to donate bread to.  That is one of the things I would like to do this year is give more.  So if anyone knows where to find places to donate bread I am open to ideas.

But back to reason for this entry.  Kyle, my husband, decided the other night he wanted to make the bread.  From start to finish all by himself.  So I asked what kind he wanted.  He wanted a light rye hearth bread.  So thanks to Hamelman and DiMuzio, I got out a calculator and made up a formula for a 20% rye, 40% preferment, 65% hydration dough.  In hind sight I should have gone to 68% to get a little bigger holes but I didn't want the dough to be too slack for my begninner husband who would have to mix the dough by hand.  The DLX is too small for 6 loaves.  So Kyle ground the rye, made the poolish, learned the french fold, and stretch and fold.  Where would I have been with out all the excellent videos I have found from this site?  I would ahve been in trouble indeed!  I weighed out all the ingredients and helped with shaping and such, but Kyle did the bulk of the work by himself.  I even tried hard not to hover!  The dough turned out really nice.   I thought he did an excellent job for his first rodeo so to speak.  But there are 2 big tricks with baking in a WFO.  The first is timing.  It is hard to get the loaves and the oven ready at the same time.  Lucky for us it has been about 50 deg here so I put the loaves in the garage to retard/proof while the oven temp gets in range.  The second trick is loading the bread.  I realized I needed a narrow peel.  Since Kyle is an avid fisherman he suggested buying a oar and sanding the varnish off.  It works like a champ!!  I would have never thought of it.  But it is hard to get all the loaves in and spaced correctly.  So below are some pictures.  One is the oar, sanded and oiled.  One is of the Counrty Rye oaves we made yesterday.  And we will see if I find any other ones to put in.

My next experiment is going to be with different grains.  I recently purchased 50lbs of spelt berries, 50lbs or durum berries and 50lbs of hard white spring wheat.  So I would like to come up with a formula and do a test and see the differences in flavor and behavior.  I am thinking of doing about 50% whole grain and 50% AP flour.  I will let you know how that goes.

The Oar- or new Peel

The loaves in the oven...nicely spaced if I may say so myself.  Or atleast better than before! :)

Lastly, the crumb..

Jani

This weekend we decided to bake a bunch of bread to give to the neighbors for Christmas.  We decided to warm up the wood fire oven Sat night.  SInce it is cooler we tend to fire it the day before and cook meat or something then bread the next day after the oven has been refired.  So last night we cooked a pork loin.  We have had good luck with birds (chickens or turkeys) but not with beef.  So we thought we would try pork this time.  It did not brown as nicely as I would have liked but it tasted wonderful.  So we baked that last night.  Then this morning I made a triple batch of multigrain whole wheat, a double batch of whole wheat, cinnamon, raisin and oat bread, and a double batch of plain white bread.  I was happy with all the dough.  I think I did a pretty good job.  I forgot to add the honey to the ww multigrain and added it after the autolayse and had a soupy mess.  But with a few fold and a little extra flour we were on our way.

I was grateful that it did not hit 70 today, even though I am sorely missing the sun.  It was about 50 and I could put the white and cinnamon raisin bread outside to proof since I needed to hold it longer that the ww multigrain.  I got concerned when my husband pulled out the coals really early.  But when it was time to load the bread, the temp was low, just undeer 400 and there wasn't much I could do.  I had 15 loaves of read and not enough fridge space.  I had my husband put some coals around the sides of the oven then we loaded the ww multigrain.  I need to work on my loading skills.  Actually I think I need a differnt peel.  But that is for later.  When I checked it 42 minutes later is was almost done and I got good oven spring.  Then we loaded the 8 loaves of white and cinnamon raisin.  Talk about oven spring.  Those loaves grew a good 2 niches in height.  I was so proud.  The oven was at about 350 by then.  So the part of the loaf in the pan did not brown as well as I wanted but they were good. 

After all the bread we put the weeks granola in the oven.  It will be good in the morning.  So I will post a few pictures.  I know that I need to work on some things, but I think we are coming right along in baking in the WFO!

Here in Texas the weather is cooling off and here in Houston we are catching up on some much needed rain.  Go figure the summer I get a wood fire oven there is a burn ban in effect from, oh, June til mid September.  So this summer I spent most of my time drooling and plotting over my new oven.  We did have time before the burn ban to get some experience with firing it, maintaining temperatures and such.  We still have disasters.  Like the burnt sanwich loaves from last weekend.  My hubby, the fire man, said I needed to put the pans in the oven, but the oven was still upwards of 600 deg.  I knew better but also knew arguing with him was pointless and he could learn the burnt way! 

So in essence I wanted to show off some pictures from some of our recent baking both in the WFO and in the regular oven.

Last weekend we fired the oven Saturday and baked a beef roast (forgot a picture but was very good) and the 5 loaves of burn bread.  Sunday we refired the oven in the am and had pizza for lunch.  Said pizzas are pictured below.  The small ones in the back were made by my 5 yr old and 2 yr old.  Our new favorite homemade pizza is Pesto, sliced romas, cooked chicken and parm mixed with mozarella. And our current favorite dough is Reinhart's Roman Dough from American Pie.

Pizza Bottom

As the oven cooled from the pizza I baked 6 new loaves of sandwich bread.  This time I made my hubby wait til 400 deg to load the bread.  After they baked we refired the oven a little and cooked 2 chickens.  When you cook meat in a wood fire oven the meat gets a great smoky, bbq flavor.  In this picture you can see the chickens and 1 1/2 of the sandwich loaves.

The last one I wanted to add was the sourdough ciabatta I made today.  I am so proud of it!  I used the recipe from here

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/lessons/myfirstsourdough

Anyway, I was proud because this was the first straight wild yeast bread I have made that was open and not gummy.  So all in all I was happy.  It went well with out butternut squash soup tonight.  The first pic is of the loaves, the second the crumb.  And there were cooked in my regular oven.

I just wanted to share. :)

So, I was cleaning in the living room yesterday when my interior wood stove caught my eye. Cast iron, good fire brick interior ... but old, and outdated. Not at all EPA certified. It's a cube of cast iron with a door and a flue and rudimentary controls. I keep it in the house just in case civilization takes a powder for longer than a month. Then I get this shiver ...

.... baking bread. And it hits me like a thunderclap, there are lots of older, non-EPA certified wood stoves being scrapped these days. The penny-trader classified paper out this way must have two free giveaway stoves each week (as people get rid of them). I am definitely going to give serious thought to building another WFO ... pretty much the same way I did last Summer, but this time watch for a classic cube shaped cast iron stove being given away, set it in and on a rammed earth pier, surround it with refractory sand and then pretty much cob-build out as before. 

Level off the interior with new firebrick up to the door lip and shazzam ... an oven that will hold heat like crazy, cast iron door, a good flue, old world reliability ... you see my point? The baking 'void' won't be the size of fancy Italian kit stoves, but hey ... despite Kiko Denzer's admonition to bake a lot of bread every time you fire up, it's just two of us and I only need one loaf at a time in the oven. 

The sand, btw, is to moderate thermal shock between the cast iron and surrounding clay/cob mass. 

I feel brilliant. Now, somebody tell me Why This Won't Work ....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/technopeasant

Trying again ...

 Let's see if the above works, first, before I continue ...

Finished my wood fired earth oven project. Took about two months and change, and I spent around $150 total. At the same time, I enclosed a side yard and made a private courtyard for entertaining and relaxing. Total cost of that was less than $300 because virtually all materials came from salvage and demolition sites. Good quality materials, at at that. Major costs were half dozen pressure treated posts and Quickcrete and various nails, screws, hardware.

Oven was built like this - foundation hole, sub-grade three feet to compensate for frost line. Built up a creek stone foundation to one and a half foot above grade, back filled with gravel. Top of this foundation wall leveled with mortar and salvaged brick to make a square and plumb foundation for the wood-form I used to pound out a rammed earth base for the oven. 

Rammed earth base is 52" x 52" and I expect it to be a superb heat sink. Made of clay and clay silt soils from my property (this is desert SW, four corners area). Mixed with what our local supplier terms 'quarter minus fines' a grade of finely sifted gravel and clay. On top of the base went 4" of sand, then a layer of firebrick. Brick and Navaho sandstone for a lintel make up the door to the oven. Built up a wet sand mold of the oven void on top of the leveled firebrick, then molded a heavy clay/sand mix around the sand-form to shape what would become the interior void of the oven. Oven is 27" x 20"

Next, lots of cob. Cob are loaves of wet clay, sand, mud and chopped straw. Many many loaves to build up the mass of the surround to make up the mass of the oven itself. More mass, more heat retention. This thing probably weighs 2 tons, at least. 

Removed the wet sand and revealed the oven void. Finished the outside with a sandy wet clay-slip. A coating of linseed oil just in case. And there you have it. Lots of physical labor and a fine oven that burns hot as that hot place in the afterlife. 

Built a brick paver area around the oven for work space, all salvaged from a 1910 school being demolished. Roof panels and posts from a theater demolition and I have a dandy outdoor wood fired oven that works like a champ. I constructed two doors out of eight inch thick slabs of wood which I covered with sheet metal. One door for firing, which just fits inside the entrance, allowing smoke to exit the chimney, and a second door made the same way that's constructed to fit further in and occlude the chimney opening for 'soaking' the fired interior. 

Pictures of bread and pizzas will follow. Hope you like it. 

I am interested to hear from anyone that has (and uses) a Brick Oven for bread and pizza baking.  I'm especially interested in learning more about sources, installation, costs, pros, cons.

Tks

Bryan