Winter. This lovely woman you see here is showing me how she makes bread in her backyard oven. A friend is pointing to the aluminum pots baking in the embers underneath the oven floor. This type of bread oven is fired from below. There is a large hole in the floor through which flames rise…
Category: (Bread Ovens)
Pane Carasau
Sardinia. 2005. Pane Carasau. This is the first baking. The dough, a yeasted dough made from semolina, is rolled out using a sheeter. The baker, a female pensionnaire. While production is in a family house, the oven in the living room, there is enough production to provide for a commercial mixer and sheeter. Note how…
Tandoor Oven 2,600 Years Ago
The tandoor oven (there are variant spellings) is ancient. There had been tandoor-style ovens for thousands of years before this terracotta figurine was made. The YouTube video that follows shows someone making an oven very similar to the one pictured above: There are lots of good YouTube and Vimeo videos that show baking in the…
Portable Oven — Campaign Oven — Dutch Oven
The impromptu oven is beyond ancient. This said, in terms of the history of bread, its documented history is recent. The documented history only goes back to ancient Greece and Rome. If you know of something earlier, then please share in your comments. The biggest literature on impromptu ovens prior to the Early Modern English…
A Georgian Tandoor Oven
This photograph, taken by Reaktion Books publisher Michael Leaman in Tiblisi, Georgia, very clearly shows that the top of the oven is angled so that breads stuck to its side will receive direct radiant heat from the embers or fire at the bottom of the oven. If you build a tandoor oven I would use…
Peruvian Watia Oven made with Spaded Soil
The impromptu Peruvian oven that is is built in the Peruvian highlands to bake potatoes can easily be adapted to bake bread. While the Peruvian watia dome is heated and then collapsed onto the potatoes, one can use the form to bake bread the usual way. The Peruvian potato oven is constructed in situ with…
A Simple Military Clay Oven circa 1895
Armies march on their stomachs. Historically, this often meant that armies marched with their bakeries. Military field manuals are a source of information in simple impromptu oven construction. The simplest oven is the item 496: An oven may be excavated in a clay bank (Fig. 6) and used at once. Few of us have sloped…
Building a Mud Oven with Soil/Concrete
The ovens demonstrated here are based on designs from the Jewish Moroccan community in Israel. They were built at the Jewish Moroccan Museum and Archive for Living Culture at Moshav Sedot Micah, a village in the center of Israel. There is a profound way in which these ovens are traditional constructions. The ovens are built…
Building a Clay or Cob Oven
This is part 6 of a multi-part video by Kurt Gardella. Kurt is affiliated with the Northern New Mexico College adobe construction program. He offers workshops in building a traditional New Mexican horno. Kurt also offers online workshops. This is a brilliant video. Anyone interested in building an earth oven (clay, cob, adobe, argile) will…
Roundboy Outdoor Products
Roundboy sells oven kits for ovens that sit on a metal stand. I provide the link to the dimensions page for one of their barrel-shaped models. What I want to point out is the 14″ roof height. When looking at oven kits be aware that the roof height tells you what the oven is designed…
William Rubel 