I've recently purchased a home thats a major fixer-upper. I'm going to be recontructing every room from the studs up, able to create whatever kitchen I like and having an affinity for artisan bread, I wanted to know before construction was done what kind of ovens are able to make good artisan bread with enough steam-trapment. I see in the Tartine Bread book that using a dutch oven in conventional ovens is a prime way for making artisan bread, but I dont want a one-loaf-at-a-time process. I'd like to have the feel of being able to use a peel to slide bread in and out of the oven without the gimmicktry of steaming pans and dutchloaf pans. Obviously I can't buy a bakery bread-baking oven. Is my only other authentic option a brick oven? I know virtually nothing about them. Must they be outside completely, or just half outside? I suppose I'll brush up on more information with books but I basically wanted to know my options with good bread-baking oven types before I do too much construction. Also, if we're looking too close at $5,000 or more, I'll stick to the gimmicks!

I am wanting to build my own wood fired oven. I live in NW Ohio and am wondering if anyone here is from Ohio and would be willing to share their experiences and possibly photos of what you built. I am looking for an outdoor oven more of a primative looking oven poosibly stacked fire brick.

Thank you

Werol

Here's my wood fired oven I built last spring. I love using it, and have a blog on cooking and baking.

http://countrywoodsmoke.wordpress.com/

I make lots of my own bread, and have a favoured overnight sponge bread recipe I use.

Have a look at my build and see how cheap and easy it can be to have your own wood fired oven.

Cheers

Marcus

This is the traditional clay oven I built in my garden. It has been absolutely brilliant for cooking pizzas, roasting meats and baking bread. If you fancy building one yourselves you can read how-to at my blog: http://clayoven.wordpress.com.

Cheers

Simon

Hi,

We are planning to build a bread oven up at our summer camp.

I am looking for an Alan Scott oven in or near Wayne county PA (570).

Please let me know.

Thanks

David

I followed a link to this heart-lifting video of the late Alan Scott that I just had to share ... enjoy!

http://www.howtohomestead.org/?page_id=761

Cheers,
Phil

Hello all!

Just found this site over the weekend. Really glad I did!

I'm in Neuville, Québec. A few years ago I built a brick oven based on Alan Scott's famous book. At the time, I used red bricks for the dome. I was too inexperienced and of course, the bricks started cracking/popping in the first year. So the second year, I removed the dome and started again with proper firebricks. In the middle of redoing the dome, I decided to cut down a big pine tree that was (too) close to the oven. Again, my lack of experience showed and of course, the tree fell right on the dome in construction!

At that point I said a few curse words and forgot about the oven for a couple of years.

Then, this year, I decided I was going to rebuild it. And here are a few pics!

I've since built a small table at the left of the entrance.

I've cooked four batches of naturally leavened 64% hydration rye/whole wheat loaves, chicken and pizza! The pizza night was fun... We were 18 total so had to cook 9 pizzas!

I've 'photo' doccumented most of the building process so if anyone is interested I'll post the pics (about 60 of them).

Best,

Hugo

OK, here I am, working on the chimney for my pizza oven. Maybe another 3 weeks or so, and I'll be (hopefully) done.

In the meantime I'm trying to gather tools and gadgets for the oven (pizza paddle, baking trays, etc.) What is it that you guys are using for the ashes/ambers, baking rolls or bread, etc.?

Any ideas for tools are welcome. Maybe with a hint where to obtain them.

Thomas

Here is a picture of the wood fired oven my husband and I built two years ago. We took a class at North House Folk School in Grand Marais, MN to learn how to do it.  Using plans from Alan Scott, and directions from Derek Luchesi, 15 people built an oven in 3 days. 

But when we got back home and started building our own, we realized that the plans without pictures weren't enough.  So we photographed each step of the way as we built our oven, and then wrote an illustrated how to book to help other people like us without a lot of masonry experience.  My book is called From Brick to Bread: Building a backyard oven.  I'm putting an advertisement for it on the for-sale page of this forum.

Yeah, I baked bread for T-G (baguettes and epi), but there's plenty of bread pics on here. So here's a few pics of another use for the WFO: T-G turkey.

We had planned on a small-ish bird this year, but My Lovely Assistant got to the store a bit too late and all they had left was jumbos. We got a 21 lb. bird.

Made our traditional stuffing (with cornbread, regular bread, mushrooms, carmelized onions, celery, apples, dried cranberries, water chestnuts, hot sausage, peppers, eggs, stock, etc.) and prepped the bird by rubbing herb butter under the skin. But it was really tough for some reason to separate the skin on this bird. Hmmm.  W'sup with that?

I had pre-heated the oven on Wed nite, baking sweets and 5 lbs of multi-color fingerlings. (Interesting factoid: I had baked bread on Sunday and the oven was at about 100 deg. surface temps on Wed. nite.) Thursday at 8:30 a.m., I fired it up again and got down to coals by 10:00. Let it soak for about 45 minutes and raked the remaining coals off to one side. I use a piece of angle iron to hold them and keep the fire banked.

Here's the coals:

I loaded the turkey into a roasting pan and into the oven and tossed a handful of sawdust on the coals every 10 minutes for about an hour. The oven was still pretty hot at this point (600+ deg. surface temps.) so I kept the bird covered loosely with foil to prevent burning.

Here's what it looks like after an hour of smoking. Note the skin burst -- must have been something about it being so hard to separate. Dunno.

At 21 pounds, I was figuring for 5-1/4 hrs of cooking. So I closed the door and went back to the kitchen for the rest of the meal preparation.

My oven is about as small as you build in a WFO, so it can't retain heat as long/hot as a larger oven, So, by about 4 hours, the oven had fallen to about 300 deg., so I moved it into the kitchen oven for the last hour. Probably could have left it in there, but I wanted to put the bread in to heat. (I had frozen a bunch of loaves that I planned to finish just before dinner.)

So here's the final result. Everybody loved it. Tender, moist and smokey. I'm now relishing the thought of leftovers and turkey stock.

ClimbHi
Pittsburgh, PA