I'm from Germany and have always made my own bread. Since I moved to America 3 years ago I have always wondered what exactly Artisan Bread is? What makes bread Artisan?
It's just a question that's always foated through my mind. Maybe you can help me out.Martina

Hello from England

I've just found 'The Fresh Loaf'. Most of you seem to be from way over on the left hand side of the map from me (at least the way we print them here), but I love the site and it's good to know that you are all out there baking

Continued from an earlier entry....

We let the first layer dry a few days, and some fairly big cracks started to form. I decided to pull out the sand to give the oven more room to shrink as needed, and to help it dry out faster. I cut a smaller door than the final size, you can see the final door scored into the surface:

I finally got up the gumption to move my construction photos over to my flickr account. Here they are in the entirety, I tried to make the titles fairly self-explanatory:

http://www.flickr.com/gp/7541655@N03/aX31kR

Here's a condensed version with some commentary:

First off is the foundation. Our frost line in in theory 48 inches, so we dug down quite a bit. We hit a VERY large rock, which made us decide the hole was big enough, and which we figured would act as a foundation in itself.