No matter what kind of an oven you decide on in the end, you must purchase Kiko Denzer’s book on clay ovens. Kiko brings a level of imagination to building ovens that is second to none. He offers you easy instructions for making an oven out of the earth — an oven that can cost you no money at all, but will work as well as the most expensive oven for home baking purposes. I live in a city with a small lot so I buy fireclay rather than dig my own — but even so it means building an oven for something in the range of $20. But what makes Kiko’s book so special and valuable is not that he shows you how to make the earth beneath your feet into an oven, it is instead the creativity he brings to the design. Ovens have been being built for thousands of years in large swaths of the world but so far as I know Kiko Denzer is the first person to see the oven as opportunity for sculptural expression.