Our wood-fired oven

It is no luxury eye-level wood-fired oven, the oven we have built in the orchard. It is a repurposed, get down on your knees wood-fired oven. Here’s the story of how we built it, starting in the summer of 2020.

The starting point was the leftover walling from what was previously a BBQ, now having reached the end of its BBQ days. First step: build the oven floor, resting on a bed of sand.

The brickie precision-placing the bricks in the sand.

The laid bricks were then covered with a layer of clay, mixed together with a small proportion of sand. The clay was “mined” from a deep hole dug by Mini Kraut in his hole-digging days :).

The front end bricks were then cemented in place with high temperature mortar.

The finished floor space measures 68 cm in width and 40 cm in depth. This was then September 2020, and that is as far as we got before the winter, which the floor spent covered with a provisional roof.

Work continued in the spring of 2021, with the new inner wall for the oven space being pieced together in April 2021.

The wall was then cemented together, with heat resistant mortar, using the same cement-in-a-bag squirt technique we use for making gingerbread houses 🙂

End of April and the five special bricks making up the front wall are in place. The special bricks were made at the brickmaking museum in Lippe, the ancestral homeland of Herman the German, and brought back by us specially for use in our oven in Franconia.

The merry month of May saw us dragging bags of sand to the oven site, sand which happened to be stored on site, fortunately.

1st of May, the oven space is filled with sand to create the domed oven roof.

The completed sand mould, with fired clay chimney pipe in place.

Mid-May 2021: wet newspaper is laid over the sand dome in preparation for applying the first layer of heat resistant mortar for the oven roof.

The cement roof was then left to dry for two weeks (covered with a provisional roof).

End of May 2021 and the now dry cement layer is ready for the insulation layer.

Our remaining self-mined clay reserves ….

were freed of leaves and debris…

and left to soak in specially ordered rain water for about a week prior to the start of work on the oven roof insulation.

The softened up clay was then mixed with straw,

and then combined with a portion of sand in a bucket,

before being applied to the oven roof.

Careful attention was paid to leaving a clear space around the chimney, ensuring that no straw-clay insulation material came into contact with the chimney.

During all of this time the oven remains filled with sand, supporting the cement roof until completion.

The freshly-applied straw-clay insulation layer then received a smoothing over with splashes of water and wet hands…

making sure that the chimney remained clear of any insulation material.

Protected by the provisional roof, the now insulated oven roof was left to dry for a week.

A week later, now the beginning of June 2021, the insulation layer is somewhat dryer, but not dried through, on account of the oven cavity still being filled with sand.

The buffer space around the chimney is filled with heat resistant mortar, making sure that the mortar is applied firmly to the chimney walls to provide support for the weight of the chimney within the oven roof.

The first moment of truth: to facilitate the drying out of the oven roof, the sand is now removed from the oven cavity.

All the sand is out and the oven roof is still intact 🙂 !

The inside of the oven space following the removal of the sand.

The sand-free oven is now left to continue to drying out for two weeks.

Mid-June 2021 and the oven roof is now well and truly dry.

The next moment of truth approaches:the oven is to be fired up for the first time, to gently heat the roof before applying the next layer…

While the oven was warming up,

we mixed up our last reserves of clay together with sand and heat resistant mortar to form the final layer of the roof.

This mix was then applied to the warm oven roof, the warming being intended to reduce cracking during drying.

The cracks appeared anway, though,

and it took several rounds of wet-hand smearing

to produce something resembling a closed finish.

The beginning of July 2021 and, after a week of drying, some of the cracks were back, but at a level we can live with…

Blackened with use by September …

we decided to get ready for the damp of winter by adding a very final layer of very thin plaster (“borrowed” from another project) to the oven roof.

This was then left to dry for about a month, due to the fact that apples had to be picked in the mean time!

Golden October and the oven was back in business with its plastered roof.

Cracks in the plaster, too, but they have stayed constant and we can live with them too. After bouncing off the walls between soggy and burnt we now have the temperature thing trimmed to brown and crispy 🙂

Ingredients for our favourite autumn focaccia bread.

Red onion, apple and wild thyme focaccia bread for the happy harvesters 🙂

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