The joy of jumping into a puddle and sinking your fingers into mud does not disappear with age. We do manage to talk ourselves out of it most of the time by focusing on the future rather than the present. My nice shoes will be muddy, my feet will be wet and I will have a miserable afternoon. But what if you can plan your afternoon around getting all muddy and cover the fact that all you really wanted to do was play with dirt. Well, that’s what Tucker, Julie and I did when we built ourselves an earthen pizza oven. The book “ Earthen Ovens” by Kiko Denzer outlined the whole process. We gathered sand, straw, bricks and broken pieces of sidewalk and went to work. Using a mud mortar and the sidewalk chunks as rocks, we built a stone wall pedestal to build the oven proper on. We laid empty beer bottles on their sides and filled the gaps up with a mixture of clay slip (watery, fine grained mud) with wood shavings (lumberyard excess) to make the subfloor insulation. This was topped with a dense layer of stiff, sandy mud and then by the oven bricks, creating a smooth oven floor. Next came the sandcastle stage. The goal is a dome shaped oven, so in order to support the arch we built a smooth dome with moistened sand. Another mixture of stiff, sandy mud coated the sandcastle and as our painfully frozen fingers recovered we let the dome dry.
Tucker and Julie adding mud around the sand dome.
That brings me to my main piece of advice: build the oven in summer. The warm mud is much more enjoyable to play with, each layer of the oven will dry faster and the long days are conducive to building longer. Once the oven dried, we excavated the sandcastle to reveal the void of the oven itself.
The dried dome, ready for a layer of insulation
Another mixture of wood shavings and clay slip completed the insulation shell and the oven. All that remained was to decorate and protect the oven. We added straw to mud and plastered the entire dome. This step can be a simple coat, or an elaborate art project. In our case we kept it to an even half inch layer to maintain the simple beauty of the dome. A final layer of lime plaster embedded with decorative shards of glass tile provided protection from the weather. I added a thick oak door mounted with a curved antler handle to seal in the heat for bread baking and provide a graceful finishing touch.Who knew playing with mud could be so productive?
When we use the oven, we start a fire right on the brick floor and keep it going for at least two hours. Once hot, the flame glides along the ceiling and bounces out the door. We push the embers one side and keep a small fire going there while we quickly bake pizzas right on the brick floor soaked in heat. Once the pizzas are all baked we pull out the fire and close the door on a few loaves of sourdough bread to let it puff and crust up. As I open the door to view the finished bread my face is engulfed in the thick, steamy air carrying the memorable scent of fresh bread.
