PART ONE: GETTING STARTED

In addition to growing fruit and vegetables, raising new laying hens, and tending a flock of meat birds, every summer we also often undertake A Project—as if picking berries, pickling cucumbers, and moving chicken tractors weren’t enough to keep us busy. This year, The Project is to build an outdoor, masonry, bake oven.

 

LOCATING THE OVEN

A masonry oven has been on our wish list for more than a decade. For just as long, we debated exactly where on the landscape to place it. We own seventeen acres, more or less. Regardless, finding a place where the oven wouldn’t be too far from the kitchen, convenient to the outdoor dining area, yet wouldn’t block our views from inside the house, has been problematic.

Our first idea was to build a cob oven with sand, water and clay specifically for wood-fired pizza. The problem is that my husband and his brother (herein referred to as “The Builders”) wanted to raise it off the ground for ease of use, and then cover it with a shed roof right outside the kitchen door.

As much as I wanted a wood-burning oven, this one sounded both too big and too ramshackle for the landscaping we’ve worked hard to establish immediately around the house. The Builders have sited and constructed a charming salt-box chicken coop, a sturdy, enclosed garden shed with attached ell, and two bridges, both of which have survived recent floods. They also built my wonderful word shop in the woods. They’re good builders with a propensity to exceed engineering standards so that these outbuildings will outlast us.

TEN YEARS LATER . . .

Over the decade during which we were debating where to locate the cob oven, we relocated the vegetable garden into a sunny field and erected a greenhouse to extend the growing season; we built a raised bed for perennials, including asparagus; and, we went on vacations, exerting ourselves biking and hiking so that when we returned home, keeping up with the homestead felt like rest.

During this time, I learned how to sustain a sourdough starter and began making fabulous bread in a super-hot, cast-iron pot in our indoor oven, and I have the burn scars to prove it. With a masonry bake oven, I hope to dispense with manipulating a 500-degree cast iron pot and all the dangers therein. I’ll be able to bake the loaf directly on the firebrick floor of the bake oven.

IN THE THICK OF IT

While we continued to debate location and size, more oven options opened up. We learned about back yard pizza ovens that ranged in price from a couple of hundred dollars to several grand. Most of these were specific to pizza; some could only bake one pizza at a time; others were big enough to roast a beast. Some of these were wood-fired ovens, and some were plug-in appliances. None of them required us to build the oven ourselves. I felt it was important to build the oven in which we would bake our homemade pizza and bread. I didn’t question this ethic until it took Tim and me most of a Saturday to lay the first nine cement blocks of the foundation, by which time it was too late to reconsider.

We are now in the thick of building a masonry oven, following free instructions we found online and the purchase of a foam mold for the barrel oven to be enclosed with brick walls and pitched roof, like a miniature version of Vermont vernacular architecture.

Subscribe to have my next post, Learning to Lay Brick, delivered by email.