I ran into Kiko Denzer today
This morning, I bicyled down to the Corvallis Winter Market (which is a lot of fun -- it's amazing what local farmers harvest here during thw winter -- greens of all sorts, leeks, potatoes, onions, squashes, spinach, sunchokes, beets, turnips, fresh eggs, stew hens ... it's fun), and I saw a booth with Kiko Denzer's [1] books, among other things, for sale. Kiko's book, Build Your Own Earth Oven [2] is a guide to building a cheap and easy wood fired oven out of cob. In fact, he's built his entire home from cob.
I asked the woman behind the table whether Kiko was teaching any classes, and she said, "Well, you can ask him. That's him behind you!" And so it was!
He's a very nice man, quiet, with the look of a college professor. He had an oven on display that was about the size of a small shipping box. He said it's big enough to bake in, though it's difficult to get the fire really roiling inside, due to the small size. But he got me thinking, "No need to build a big oven. I could just build a small earth oven, big enough for a pizza and a couple of loaves.
So, maybe I will. Anyway, it was fun meeting someone I'd admired from afar for quite some time.