Earth oven, continued
On Tuesday we poured the concrete slab for Tish's oven and today we started laying brick for the foundation. This brick has provenance. The Smithsonion Folk Festival on The Mall in 1976 (the bicentenial year) included a demo of brick laying by the Masonry Union. It was required that the large brick structure be dismantled at the end of the summer festival. I was able to salvage a whole bunch. So Tish's oven base is being built with the last of the "Bicentenial Brick"
We still have a lot of brick and other masonry work to do before the oven building. That should be the weekend of the 20th.
BJ
Gardening, cooking and woodworking in South'n Murlyn'
Gardening, cooking and woodworking in South'n Murlyn'
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(post #11510, reply #1 of 52)
That's *really* cool!
(post #11510, reply #2 of 52)
you got pics?
(post #11510, reply #3 of 52)
We didn't think to take a picture of the concrete slab, however, we've taken a picture of the day's work as we wrapped up the two days of brick-laying we have done so far.
I. Am. The world's. Worst. (repeat that) Worst. Bricklayer. Two days of this and I'm still not an expert. BeeJay lays two bricks to my one and mixes up the fresh mud so I can catch up.
However, I have taken care of the most important part of the project - I've designed a project logo for the tee shirts I'm going to give my helpers (if there are any). Here's the helpers' shirt design and my own design:
(post #11510, reply #4 of 52)
Those are great!
(post #11510, reply #5 of 52)
those are too cute!
I didn't realize beejay could lay bricks... hmmmm, I should have put the guys to work when he was up here, but I was just feeling too lazy for anything that was going to take energy!
(post #11510, reply #6 of 52)
I tol' ya I came to work and you said all the work was done.;-)
BJ
(post #11510, reply #7 of 52)
work was done, but these other things aren't really work!!!
(post #11510, reply #8 of 52)
The first day's bricklaying (I told you I am slow):
(post #11510, reply #9 of 52)
OK, here is the oven foundation growing, slowly. Brick sides, open in front for wood storage, and a concrete top:
(post #11510, reply #10 of 52)
On top of the foundation, we put in a ring two bricks high. This is the side support for the oven's floors. First an insulated subfloor of perlite mixed with clay slip packed around bottles - wine bottles, Belgian Ale bottles, fancy Italian soda-pop bottles, olive oil bottles, what ever we had, plus a bunch donated by my choir, who expect bread for their efforts.
Then a dense subfloor of cob, the over a thin layer of sand, a layer of fire brick. The fire and the baking will go directly on top of the fire brick.
This is as far as we have gotten. Tomorrow I host the first oven-building party, to sculpt the inner oven void out of sand and build the dense oven structural wall. The food is ready. I have deviled eggs, beef barbecue, chicken salad with Thai-style peanut dressing, tabouleh, potato salad, blueberry-oatmeal cookies and brownies.
Edited 7/18/2008 10:49 pm ET by Tish
(post #11510, reply #11 of 52)
that is just unbelievably cool! I love it! So the brick mason is that young fellow? The whole process takes about how long?
(post #11510, reply #12 of 52)
Nanook, the young fellow laying the firebrick is my younger son, age 12. My older son, age 14, took the pictures. We have tried to make every part of this process a family affair. My husband even helped put in the cement block in the foundation's inner wall. Frankly, that's more amazing than the 12-year-old laying brick! Nobody looking at this thing would every mistake it for professional work, but we worked on it together. And think of all the hours the boys are not spending bickering over the X-Box!
We have worked about two weeks on the foundation, from digging the hole for the concrete pad to pouring the concrete top. Then we laid the brick ring (one day) put in the sub-floor insulation (one day) and then put in the remaining floor layers (one day). The process can be speeded up by making a simpler foundation, and doing more work in a day. We are slow, slow masons. But it is beastly hot here and our work space is in full sun in the middle of the day, so we're doing a few hours a day. We're using Kiko Denzer's book, "Build Your Own Earth Oven," and there are places in the process that he identifies as good places to stop so we do.
Today's work will build the main oven structure. Then during this week we will start drying out the clay with small fires and next week we will add another layer of insulation to the exterior and add an outer layer of cob. So all told, we will have worked almost four weeks on this. The foundation has been the hardest part.
Thank you for your compliments, I really appreciate it. I've been so fortunate to have BeeJay's help with this. He knew that I have wanted one for years and he really got the whole project started, and has guided us and worked with us through the whole thing.
Edited 7/19/2008 8:30 am ET by Tish
(post #11510, reply #13 of 52)
What a great memory your boys are making this summer. I assume you'll be baking bread and pizza, what else will you cook in there? I've got a recipe for Alsatian Flammkuchen somewhere that could be fun.
North Carolina - zone 7
North Carolina - zone 7
(post #11510, reply #17 of 52)
Karen, I don't know what-all I can cook and I'm ready to play. Of course, there are a variety of flatbreads that don't cook properly without a hot enough surface, so Pizzas and pitas are on the list. I've been reading that there is a pattern for cooking that follows the slowly declining temperatures: Flatbreads, sourdough breads, yeast breads, sweet baking such as pies and cakes, then braises and stews which cook for hours if not overnight. Finally, yogurt.
So how do you like the idea of getting up and having a slow braised pot-roast fresh out of the oven for breakfast? Personally I'm not into it, but if I had a very full day I'd be glad to have a prepared pot roast all ready to warm up. I like meat roasts cooked in very high heats for a few minutes then roasted at lower temperatures. I want to see how the falling temps in this oven work with beef and poultry.
One oven owner has written that his family fires their oven every two weeks and after baking two weeks worth of bread they bake enough stews, lasagnas, and casseroles for most of their dinners until the next firing. I'll just have to see how this oven works with my family's eating style and my cooking style. I might even start to like making my own pizza.
(post #11510, reply #18 of 52)
Yesterday we completed the basic construction of the oven itself. First we shaped the void of the oven's interior with damp sand, the built a 3-inch thick wall of cob. My sons and their Very Tall Friend were designated cob stompers. VTF turned out the be the only person who could see the top of the oven without standing on a lawn chair, so he was called in to advise when we got near the top. BeeJay climbed up on a lawn chair and put the last co in place.
One mistake we learned from while making BeeJay's oven was that soft building cob will slump as weight builds up on it. This time we worked with our clay about as stiff as we could work it. One affect of that is that it wasn't very easy to smooth out the surface. This oven currently looks like a very brown igloo. Next week we will add a 3-inch layer of insulation and another 1 inch of cob.
These photos were taken by one of my helping friends, Maria.
(post #11510, reply #19 of 52)
That's looks really cool. Who's the good-looking guy in the suspenders?
(post #11510, reply #20 of 52)
Isn't he something? On Saturday, after spending all day on my oven and driving the 100 mile round trip from his home to mine and back, he dug me another 12 5-gallon buckets of clay for the next stages of the project! I live on a mountain of clay, but there are sop many rocks we can't dig it. He has a downed tree that has exposed a big pocket of pure clay where the root ball came up. My older son and I were going to go down this week and dig, but he left the buckets sitting there for us to just take away. I've known him for almost 50 years, and I'm still amazed.
He is doing a favor for a friend and will be back on line in a few days.
(post #11510, reply #21 of 52)
We scooped out the sand today and lit our first drying fire. There are cracks opening up in a couple of areas where the clods of cob weren't pressed into the clay beside them as well as into the clay below them. I had kind of expected that. I'm leaving the door off and the oven open to air dry and tomorrow we will begin some crack repair with softened cob. Pictures will follow.
(post #11510, reply #14 of 52)
wow!!
I didn't realize the whole thing is such a long process! (good thing we didn't start making one Beejay, you'd still be up here!)
We are also experiencing a heat wave. If you're not out by at least 6:30 consider the day a write off for getting anything done outside. I'm frantically trying to get everything outside well watered and at least prepped as we're leaving for a vacation tomorrow. ( I caved in again this year!)
Hmmm, maybe I can convince you guys and beejay to come up again next month (okay maybe next year) and start my mud oven. I know my daughter is constantly asking whether Carrie is coming back up in August!
(post #11510, reply #15 of 52)
Tish, why glass bottles?
zone 6 gardening in the woods with 30,000 deer
zone 6 gardening in the woods with 30,000 deer
(post #11510, reply #16 of 52)
Sarah, I used glass because the book said to use glass.
I think it is because they are strong enough to hold up the oven floor. The perlite and clay mix will crush and subside over time if there isn't something in there to hold them up. The bottles are separated from the fire by the fire bricks and 3" of cob, so they probably won't get hot enough to be damaged by the heat. I've been figuring on these questions and so has BeeJay because big pockets of air don't insulate as well as little ones do.
But Kiko says that one of the best and cheapest materials he has found for the job is glass bottles, so we, poor believing fools, used bottles.
(post #11510, reply #22 of 52)
I'm guessing you have a cat, lol. Watch out for cigars in that sand!!
(post #11510, reply #23 of 52)
All the sand and all the clay are kept in covered buckets so that we can control the moisture.
BJ
(post #11510, reply #24 of 52)
Here's another late update. My son downloaded the pictures he took at our last group-work day on July 26th, but Adobe has them all locked together and I can't figure out how to post the singles I want.
We built the insulation layer and outer wall over the dense inner wall we'd built the week before. The insulation is a mix of 2 parts perlite, 1 part fine chopped straw, and one part clay slip. The clay is about 1 part water to 4 parts clean clay sifted through 3/8" hardware cloth. As the day wore on it got harder and harder to mix the insulation because the buckets I had set aside for these ratios were being grabbed up for other jobs. However, we persevered.
We built the outer wall about 1 inch thick, leaving a three inch gap to infill with the insulation. At about 3 or 4 inches of height, the wall would need to be filled in, so that way we built the two layers together. I made handy little measuring tools by gluing pairs of Popsicle sticks together at right angles three inches from the end and marking the inches on both sides. There were 7 or 8 of them so if there was a question about the thickness, we always had one at hand.
Some people who helped earlier had made tiles with a picture or name and I set these into the walls as we built. At the end, the rest of us wrote our own names in the clay. I'll also have those pictures in another post.
(post #11510, reply #25 of 52)
Pictures for the last post:
(post #11510, reply #26 of 52)
Here are some of the personalizations the builders added to the oven's outer wall. What a variety! The oven developed some pretty deep cracks as it was drying. You'll see the crack repair s going through some of the designs. Also, two designs were damaged when the tarp dripped during a thunderstorm.
(post #11510, reply #27 of 52)
This is the final update before I go on vacation. BeeJay is building a little shelter for the oven - just a little craftsman style structure with ####deep overhang to keep rain and snow off of the baker as well as the oven. My older son helped cut the wood. My younger son proved to be better at the PhD work, though. (Post hole Digger)
BeeJay has done most of the construction himself. When finished, the wood will be stained dark green and there will be a copper weathervane on the roof.
I made the first successful batch of bread in the new oven and took a picture of it half-way through the baking.
(post #11510, reply #28 of 52)
That is just too cool! Be sure to post a pic of it when you get the weather vane on it (and more pics of that handsome dude, as well). And if it's not too much trouble, email me a loaf of that bread! Yum!
(post #11510, reply #29 of 52)
It looks really great.
New Mexico home organic gardener
Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience. Emerson
(post #11510, reply #30 of 52)
Well Jeana, That does it. I'm no longer BJ. I'm now HD. (giggle)
HD