Re: How I came to build the oven - CountrySmallholding Forums

Forest Artisan

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16/02/2006, 12:11 PM

Forest Artisan is not online. Last active: 06/03/2008 14:48:44 Forest Artisan

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Joined on 07/02/2006
Norfolk
Posts 10

How I came to build the oven

Ever since cooking in a vegetarian restaurant as a student I have been a keen baker always interested in trying out new recipes and experimenting. Elizabeth David’s book English bread and yeast cookery stretched my skills. So, having met Andrew Whitley, who owned the Village Bakery in Cumbria, I enrolled on a couple of the courses he ran. Andrew was passionate about rye and sour dough baking which he had researched in Russia, which was very infectious. He also baked in a wood fired oven, which was pure magic. Not only did the bread have a depth of taste unlike anything I had tasted, but they used waste wood from a local source to fire the oven. Andrew employed Paul Merry an artisan baker from Australia to teach the courses and I went back year after year eager to learn everything I possibly could. Paul left the Village Bakery and now runs Panary from a water powered flour mill just outside Shaftesbury in Dorset.

After not too long I found my domestic kitchen oven lacking. It wouldn’t get really really hot enough,  I couldn’t replicate the thick and chewy crusts on wood fired loaves, it wasn’t really big enough and it wasn’t fuelled by a renewable resource like wood. Paul Merry became the agent for Le Panyol ovens. Last year I eventually persuaded my other half, that a wood burning oven would be an excellent idea. In Le Panyol brochures they show how their ovens are easily incorporated in to kitchens, patios and outbuildings. Having it in the kitchen was obviously a non starter and our only suitable outbuilding is next to the oil tank, so I had to think again. The oven kits need to be surrounded lots of insulation so it was clear it wasn’t going to be a tiny feature. I decided to make a feature of it, so that if we ever sell the property I wouldn’t feel it had to taken down to be able to sell the house. It needed to fit in and so I decided to try to make it look like it had always been there. So its built in a local traditional style like many houses in this part of Norfolk. Luckily, we also had left over building materials from renovating our house, so the cost wasn't sky high.

Driving round, I saw some guys building an extension to a house in the chalk lump style and asked whether they would help me to build my oven. Although they’d never built an oven before, they said that if I had plans they would have a go. The oven arrived from France on a huge lorry - the kit looked like set of children's building blocks but on a massive scale. There were two pages of instructions (in French) with a few drawings, it was going to be a make it up as we went along project. I scoured the internet and picked up some valuable tips mainly from people in the US where pizza ovens seem quite popular in states like California.

I cleared an area opposite the kitchen in the bushes and the team set to work:

Firstly constructing a concrete platform for it to sit on

Rather than waste the space underneath where the oven would sit we made a storage area in which to keep things like the peel, rake, matches etc.

Then came the tricky bit putting the oven jigsaw together - it soon became obvious that my schoolbook French doesn’t cover technical oven building terms and the builders french stopped at “a beer please”!

However we eventually managed to get the pieces to stay together and the kit oven was covered in a layer of runny lime mortar which would seep into the crack between the blocks.

After this, the builders were back on safer ground - they just carried on as if they were building a house, filling in the space above the oven and into the roof with vermiculite which would act as insulation.

So how does the oven work? You light a fire which heats up the whole mass, this is not a massive fire nor lots of wood - roughly one wheelbarrow per firing. When the wood has burned to practically nothing you rake out the coals sweep the oven floor and put your loaves directly onto it. And put the door in place.

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03/07/2008, 8:47 AM

Ovenbottom is not online. Last active: 03/07/2008 07:48:26 Ovenbottom

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Joined on 03/07/2008
Sussex
Posts 1

Re: How I came to build the oven

I've been looking at your postings with interest and envy!!

I am a baker (for over 30 years) and have dreams of owning a smallholding. All the stuff you've posted is very interesting and the quality of your baking is very high and think it's brilliant that somebody is keeping these old methods alive. Keep up the good work, and best wishes for the future.

Baking nights and smallholding daydreams

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CountrySmallhol...Blogs Forest Artisan Re: How I came to build the oven

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