Description

Build Your Own Earth Oven

A Low-Cost Wood-Fired Mud Oven; Simple Sourdough Bread; Perfect Loaves

Kiko Denzer; with Hannah Field, Foreword by Alan Scott

New Revised Edition

“Creative. Innovative. Brilliant.
…the definitive book on how to
build an adobe oven . . .
—William Rubel, author, The Magic of Fire

Earth ovens combine the utility of a wood-fired, retained-heat oven with the ease and timeless beauty of earthen construction. Building one will appeal to bakers, builders, and beginners of all kinds, from:

• the serious or aspiring baker who wants the best low-cost
  bread oven, to
• gardeners who want a centerpiece for a beautiful
  outdoor kitchen, to
• outdoor chefs, to
• creative people interested in low-cost materials and
  simple technology, to
• teachers who want a multi-faceted, experiential project for students of all ages (the book has been successful with
  everyone from third-graders to adults).

Build Your Own Earth Oven is fully illustrated with step-by-step directions, including how to tend the fire, and how to make perfect sourdough hearth loaves in the artisan tradition. The average do-it-yourselfer with a few tools and a scrap pile can build an oven for free, or close to it. Otherwise, $30 should cover all your materials—less than the price of a fancy “baking stone.” Good building soil is often right in your back yard, under your feet. Build the simplest oven in a day! With a bit more time and imagination, you can make a permanent foundation and a fire-breathing dragon-oven or any other shape you can dream up.

Earth ovens are familiar to many that have seen a southwestern “horno” or a European “bee-hive” oven. The idea (pioneered by Egyptian bakers in the second millennium bc!) is simplicity itself: fill the oven with wood, light a fire, and let it burn down to ashes. The dense, 3- to 12-inch-thick earthen walls hold and store the heat of the fire, the baker sweeps the floor clean, and the hot oven walls radiate steady, intense heat for hours.

Home bakers who can’t afford a fancy, steam-injected bread oven will be delighted to find that a simple earth oven can produce loaves to equal the fanciest “artisan” bakery. It also makes delicious roast meats, cakes, pies, pizzas, and other creations. Pizza cooks to perfection in three minutes or less. Vegetables, herbs, and potatoes drizzled with olive oil roast up in minutes for a simple, elegant, and delicious meal. Efficient cooks will find the residual heat useful for slow-baked dishes, and even for drying surplus produce, or incubating homemade yogurt.

About the Author
Kiko Denzer lives with his wife in a small cabin in Blodgett, Oregon. This book comes out of his experience of learning about, and falling in love with mud—the oldest (and, according to some, still the best) building material there is. It is also the product of his belief that participating in creation is better than going shopping. “Real value,” he says, “is a function of involvement and life,” not just the dollar price that you pay for “artisan” loaves in a fancy market.

As a sculptor, Denzer approaches both oven building and baking as art. As a writer and teacher, however, he sees art simply, as the fruit of human life and love. Quoting Kahlil Gibran, he says, “if work is love made visible, then love is everywhere you look.” It follows, he continues, that “to be either artist or craftsman is no more and no less than it is to be human: to engage hands, head, and heart in the genesis of form and relationship; to celebrate and renew self and world; to be whole and wholly involved; to offer communion and to build community; or just to make a mud oven so you can bake your own bread.”