As wonderful as roasting before an open fire is, it is simply not the best method for all foods. Sometime in deep prehistory, the technical range of cooks was broadened by the understanding that heat can be stored in something as basic as a rock, then deployed culinarily.
Long before the development of ceramic or metal vessels, the idea of retained heat, made real in the form of hot stones, permitted the simmering of foods in convenient but non-flameproof containers such as hides, stomachs, and wooden or bark boxes. This technique lives on today in the form of the Mongol khorkhog, where heated river stones are layered into a container — for millennia the stomach of an animal, today a sealable milk can — with mutton or goat meat, vegetables, and water.
Entirely taken for granted today, simmering allowed humans to derive nourishment and enjoyment from bones, sinews, hard seeds, fibrous roots, and many other foods that need softening or rendering to be edible.
But what about occasions when ancient cooks faced truly massive cooking operations? Retained heat to the rescue again. For millennia, the pit or earth oven, a precursor to the retained heat masonry oven, allowed cooks to tackle the biggest tasks, according to archaeological evidence from the Pecos River to the Ukraine to the Indus Valley to North Africa. These were big tasks, like baking a gigantic heap of agave plants or (seriously) a mammoth.
Current pit-cooking practices from the South Pacific Islands to the Yucatan Peninsula to New England, complemented by documentary material and oral histories, hint at the range of techniques and materials involved over centuries as cooks have fired up a hole in the ground and cooked in the residual heat.
Probably the best-known examples of earth ovens originate in the South Pacific among peoples of Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and the Polynesian Islands. There are many subtle variations in the general Pacific Islander school of pit-baking. One common method involves balancing all the stones to be heated atop a huge hardwood pyre before starting the fire — all the fuel and the rocks are stacked up together in a shallow pit and set alight. It’s a dramatic technique that advantageously leaves some very hot rocks available to actually stick inside the hard-to-cook parts of whole animal carcasses before they get buried in the steamy leaf-lined pit.
Kalua pig is certainly the most familiar of these earth-oven treatments in the United States. The fire is made as just described in a pit called an imu, and burned until all that is left is a pile of glowing rocks. Banana tree stalks and leaves and ti leaves are variously readied to create steam and enclose and protect the food.
The kalua pig is a living part of the culture of the Hawaiian people, as well as a staple of the tourist luau. It is both performance and celebration, and offers an indelible sense of place. The more I thought about earth ovens, the more this thread came back to me. The basic idea, pit, rocks, fire, pig — could happen almost anywhere. Even the celebratory/touristic nature of pit cooking seems an inevitable part of the package. It’s the plant matter — in this case, ti leaves and banana stalks — that offers the sense of locality and really set it apart.
Without those plants, it’s impossible to make an “authentic” kalua pig. Sure, these days I could probably have ti leaves overnighted to my door, but that really defeats the idea behind these simplest of foods, which were invented by good cooks who made the very best of the particular situations they were dealt.
But is it foolish to create a Cape Cod kalua? Our temperate New England plants and trees just don’t make leaves on a tropical scale: fleshy, juicy, and large and sturdy enough to wrap and protect food. But the native pit-cooking tradition of my own region points the way via the clambake. The ocean provides perfect steam-creating buffering plants in heaps — seaweed is the banana tree of my terroir.
By following the principles of the Pacific Island earth oven, we should all be able to bring some of the excitement of underground cooking into our lives. Adapting the technique to local ingredients and conditions can be half the fun.
It may seem pretentious of me to think of adapting a tradition in this way, but I am not the first. Another classic earth oven is the Maya pib. The first people who brought that idea to the Yucatan were bummed to find no suitable stones for pit cooking. Instead of giving up the idea as “inauthentic” to the place, they “made” stones for the purpose out of clay. Archaeologists have discovered oodles of fist-size lumps of fired clay which bear the molecular imprint of repeated heatings in the presence of various foodstuffs, including corn and squash. These finds hint at the latitude of items which may have gotten the pib treatment.
Today, the most famous pib dish is cochinita pibil (literally, “little pig cooked in a pit”), usually described in tourist literature as a primordial pre-Columbian food. But everything about this dish, even in its most “authentic” form, displays a brilliant sort of evolution, an ongoing fusion, starting with its half-Spanish, half-Mayan name. When the Spanish arrived with their European hogs, what had once been a preparation for wild peccary was applied to this domestic meat.
The paste smeared on the pig is still redolent of both the Mayan and Spanish kitchens — the Central American achiote, or annatto, and allspice pounded with European garlic and citrus. The traditional accompaniments, too, are bicultural — the small corn tortillas of the Yucatan paired with salads of European vegetables: crisp cabbage and wilted onion.
So if this clearly “inauthentic” food can be so wonderful to eat, I am encouraged to apply clambake techniques to “a little pig” next summer and see what comes of it. At least I won’t have to make my own rocks.
And, to close these musings, consider the most exciting underground cooking fire of all — magma from a nearby volcano. Cooks on the Azorean island of San Miguel layer various cuts of pork, beef, and chicken, with cabbage, kale, potatoes, and sausages in huge kettles, and slide them into steamy silos for a six-hour spell by the sulfurous shores of Furnace Lake. The resulting stew, cocido das furnas, is a local adaptation of the Iberian favorite mixed meat and vegetable dish. But volcanic gases supply the defining mystery ingredient in place of smoky steaming vegetation.
And rather like the clambake and all the rest of the surviving subterranean cooking traditions, the performance is part of the dish, in a hygienic reenactment for tourists of what was once purely a celebratory mode of marking a festive occasion. But, unlike those traditions, this is one that the rest of us can’t just try at home, unless we too happen to live near a convenient steam vent.
There’s something very exciting about digging into the ground and finding a piping hot, absolutely delicious meal, even if you are the one who placed the raw materials down in the hole to begin with. If you’ve closed things up properly, there’s no aroma, and in some cases, not even any steam or other clue to the magic that is taking place underground.
Here are a few traditional earth-oven favorites. Once you have tried one or two, you may want to invent your own.
In the last century or so, commercial operators in the southern New England clambaking heartland have nestled quite a range of foods under the tarp with the shellfish — great racks of potatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, linguica, chicken quarters, fish fillets, sweet corn, whole eggs, and poultry stuffing, to name a few. Now, one problem with this panoply, beside the loss of focus on the shellfish, will be obvious to anyone who has ever cooked these items: it takes ten minutes to cook some of them and an hour to cook others, yet there they all are in the same sauna together.
It is therefore satisfying to strip away all extraneous matter and get back to basics. Excluding all but the essentials makes kitchen preparation nonexistent, keeping everyone outside by the fire and having fun. It also means that advance planning is kept to the joyous activities of gathering seaweed from the shore and digging a hole and lining it with stones. Most importantly, this technique surely produces the most delicious lobster ever eaten.
You may scale down to two lobsters or up to a hundred, but the proportions I’m giving here will comfortably accommodate 10 to 12.
Go to the shore and collect two 5-gallon buckets of seaweed. Rockweed, which has nice moisture-holding bubbles, is the preferred type, but it is not essential. I like to rinse each clump of seaweed in sea water as I pick it up, swishing away clinging sand. Keep it moist until zero-hour. If you are unsure about where to get rockweed, discuss it with the person from whom you are acquiring your lobsters; it is often used to pack and ship them.
Dig a pit and line its bottom and sides with more or less grapefruit-size stones. Aim for a finished result about three feet in diameter and about a foot deep. (Scale all these proportions up for a larger bake.)
Kindle a fire and gradually really stoke it up. You can burn a mixture of wood, but the majority should be hardwood. This type of fire is a good opportunity to clean up branches around the yard and get rid of big, odd-shaped, unsplittable chunks of wood (“logs of shame,” a woodstove-owning friend calls them). It’s also the kind of fire that pyromaniacs enjoy; there’s no control-freak cook yelling at them to quit messing with it. The sole aim is to heat up the surrounding rocks and dirt, so there’s no harm in building a big, exciting blaze.
Meanwhile, line up all the gear you’ll need for the bake: your fire shovel, the seaweed (make sure it’s still wet), the lobsters in a cooler under wet burlap, a pair of scissors, a dampened large clean sheet of cloth (like an old bedsheet), a cotton dropcloth, and then something more steamproof like a chunk of an old sail or, failing that, a vinyl tarp. We have also found a large solid object that fits over the pit (like an upside-down saucer-shaped commercial metal fire pit) to be handy, but not essential.
Feed the fire for the last time with a good pile of small-diameter hardwood sticks. When these have burned down to smallish coals, everything should be standing by, ready to go. You’ll want an extra pair of hands or two at this point — a great opportunity to involve your guests.
Work swiftly from this stage until the pit is covered. Get two helpers started with the scissors, snipping the rubber bands from the lobsters’ claws. With your shovel or a rake, pull out any unburned wood or large embers that might remain in the fire. If any stones have fallen out of place, try to nudge them where they’ll do the most good. Spread about three inches of seaweed on the pit evenly. Arrange the lobsters snugly in a single layer on the seaweed. Cover them with seaweed, and ring the whole pit with more seaweed. Fold the damp bedsheet into an arrangement that will cover the pit, and drape it over the whole pile. Follow with the drop cloth and whatever other steam barriers you may have devised. Last goes the vinyl tarp with some logs or other weights around the edges. Set your timer for one hour, have a refreshment, and relax.
(At this point, despite the dramatic tension of the buried lobsters, the emotional vim of your gathering may be subtly sapped by the disappearance of the fire. I recommend removing the large burning chunks you raked out of the pit to another location to start a new fire, if only for recreational purposes and for convenient disposal of lobster shells later.)
When your hour has elapsed, simply excavate, and enjoy. Have an old dishcloth handy to give each lobster a quick wipe before it goes on the plate. Even pre-swished seaweed is bound to shed some sand.
If you don’t happen to live on the New England shore as I do, putting on a lobster bake may prove unjustifiably expensive and silly. But cooking underground need not be costly. One fun and delicious traditional application of this technique followed loggers all over the northern tier of North America — bean-hole beans. Essentially, logging camp cooks adapted the traditional staple of baked beans to the transient life by using an earth oven as a stand-in for the accustomed brick oven.
Bean-hole beans involve a long timetable, but the work is enjoyable and punctuated with long stretches of passive waiting. The beans are great for breakfast — all the work is long over by then, but for the excavation — and can’t fail to provide a dramatic morning diversion for overnight guests.
You’ll need a large cast-iron pot with a bail and a very snug-fitting lid. Consider explicitly how you will keep dirt from finding its way into this pot when it is buried. Heavy-duty foil can provide a helpful barrier. Some bean-hole devotees go so far as to have fabricated a steel lid that fits down an inch or two over the rim of the pot, completely protecting the contents from shifting sands and careless shovel work. (We have successfully used yet another cast-off part from a burnt-out Weber grill — the very light-duty aluminum ash-catcher that hangs beneath the lower vents — as a sort of a helmet placed upside-down over our securely lidded pot of beans.)
Prepare the bean-hole while the beans are soaking, or ahead, if you’d rather. Make a cylindrical pit, about three feet deep, about twice the diameter of your bean-kettle. Line the bottom and the perimeter of the lowest portion of the pit with stones. Make sure your pot will have plenty of elbow room.
There are a few other oddments you may want to have in hand. A long-handled hook of some sort is helpful for lowering in, and almost essential for hauling out, the pot. Gather some leafy material — ferns or bracken, tall grass or reeds or rushes — to pack over the pot.
Serves 8
The following recipe features ingredients and proportions authentic to nineteenth-century usage. The finished beans are savory, brothy, and complex, flavored with, more than sweetened by, molasses. They are a revelation of essential beaniness, in terms of both texture and flavor, compared to the syrupy article usually on offer. Go out of your way to find good quality dry beans. Traditional for this purpose, and for good reason, are a few heirloom varieties with excellent flavor and texture: Jacob’s Cattle, Yellow Eye, Soldier, and Marfax. Salt pork made at home, or by a trusted butcher, elevates these beans yet further.
The wood-fired masonry oven, at only a few thousand years old, is a relative newcomer. The general type of oven familiar to us today came to us via classical Greece and Rome; its design driven by the baking needs of risen loaves of bread. The griddle and the tannur are all very well for flatbreads, but the front-loading vaulted oven allows for the slower, even heat required for the vast family of breads descended from the risen loaves of antiquity. This particular oven technology arose at an intersection in human understanding of fermentation (the process whereby microorganisms create carbon dioxide) and of gluten (the protein abundant in wheat that allows a dough to capture that gas). The subtle interplay of these forces (and their microscopic allies and antagonists) still delight and bedevil bakers to this day.
Thanks to the expansiveness of the Roman Empire, and all those military mouths to feed in far-flung locales, Roman oven remains are very widespread. Europeans did not stop baking in the post-Roman era, so the technology has endured and spread through conquest and colony over the last 1,500 years. Wherever masons and bakers have gone, ovens have sprung up.
In earlier chapters, we considered a range of techniques for wood-fired cooking and baking that spare you the expense, trouble, and commitment of building or buying an actual oven. After all, if you can make a great pizza on a grill, roast a luscious chicken on a string, and bake a perfect loaf of bread in a campfire, do you really need to spend the time and money on a big chunk of masonry that will take up space in your yard or kitchen for years to come? If, on the other hand, you have mastered and enjoyed baking in the ashes, against a plank, on a griddle, in a cast-iron pot, or in a tannur, and yet your urge for wood-fired baking is unfulfilled, well, alright — rest assured that you have come by this self-knowledge honestly.
If you have decided that you need to have a wood-fired oven of your own, nothing I can say is liable to dissuade you. I understand this because when I left the living history museum where I had enjoyed building and baking in wood-fired ovens sporadically for a couple of decades, I could not rest until I had built one to use at home. I was surprised myself by the fervor with which I plotted this course over a winter, and the obsessive speed with which I achieved my goal as soon as spring thaw allowed. So it would be hypocritical for me to pooh-pooh your conviction.
Indeed, there is much to appreciate about a wood-fired oven in your yard or house. Even the humblest little mud oven will elevate your bread-baking abilities and will bake the best pizza you’ve ever eaten. No matter where you are as a baker — from newbie to master — having your own wood-fired oven will spark your learning and drive you to enjoy baking more.
And, of course, the oven goes way beyond bread and pizza. So many other foods can be cooked as the oven heats and cools. I outline a few recipes to follow to acquaint you with some basic techniques. No doubt you’ll be quick to add to them with adaptations from your own cooking repertoire.
I also take back that “taking up space” slander. The oven should be beautiful and pleasing to look at even cold. And during gatherings, it becomes a natural centerpiece independent of its cooking ability, just by virtue of containing a raging fire so attractively.
Selecting the type of oven right for you requires yet more self-reflection. Know the answers to the following questions before embarking on a decision: What do you think you’d like to bake, and on what scale? Will it be important to you to bake batch after batch of bread at one firing, or are your aims more modest? What is your level of DIY inclination? Are you interested in the oven-building as much as the baking, or do you just want to bake as soon as possible? What kind of budget can you commit? What are your location options?
There’s an oven for every budget. The home-baker’s little mud oven shown above can be built for about $50-100 in supplies. Or a much more considerable investment pays Maine Wood Heat Company to outfit you beautifully with the custom Le Panyol oven seen here.
Building your own oven can be tremendously satisfying, but it’s not to be entered into lightly. Conceptually and physically simple as it may be, an oven nonetheless benefits from careful planning and entails a bit of heavy labor. You can build a mud oven with excellent baking qualities ridiculously cheaply if you are a dedicated scrounger like me. If you are a perfectionist and would like to build a brick-and-mortar oven for the ages, you may spend a few years and quite a bit of money on materials and plans. (I actually have met some oven enthusiasts who are all about the construction; to them the baking seems almost incidental.)
Paying someone else to build your oven will relieve you of many burdens but not that of decision-making; there are many options here as well. You may buy a refractory clay oven core (for anywhere between $1,000 and $8,000), which takes a lot of the guesswork out of providing yourself with an efficient baking chamber. But then you (or your mason) will need to ensconce that core in at least an outer veneer, if not additional thermal mass and/or insulation.
Choosing a core manufacturer, if you go that route, is only getting more confusing with time as wood-fired ovens become more popular. The number of manufacturers selling precast dome sections and other kit options has increased significantly in the last decade, with many new entries onto the field undercutting the prices of the more venerable French, Spanish, and Italian producers. The old-guard companies counter by questioning the quality of the upstart brands.
It can be a game changer to hire a mason from the very outset. A tradesperson can certainly install and finish a purchased core, but, more importantly, he or she might tempt you away from the core by underbidding it with a sweet custom brick-and-mortar oven. The Masonry Heater Association of North America maintains a large directory of professionals who are experienced with safely and efficiently accommodating fire. Over the course of decades, this organization has fostered the commitment of its members to wood-fired baking as well as heating.
The bottom line? It’s all up to you. If you can afford it, a gorgeous, big, top-of-the-line Le Panyol is absolutely dreamy to use, indoors or out; but it is way beyond the means of many of us. (The aggregate costs of a beauty I recently baked in came to more than four times the value of the car I arrived in — or about 250 times the materials cost for one of my mud ovens!)
If you are lucky enough to have an old brick oven in your chimney, count your blessings and find a good mason. You want someone who is knowledgeable about and accomplished in the use of lime and clay mortars, and who is enthusiastic about your rehabilitation project. (It’s most ideal if the mason is small or has a small apprentice — I’m not joking! These things are a lot easier and cheaper to repair from the inside.)
At the very least, have a mason inspect the oven and any associated flues and dampers for safety. I have seen ovens opened that had been paneled over for more than a century and found to be in pristine, perfectly usable-today condition. I have also seen piles of rubble, char, and spider webs so confusing that it was impossible to tell where the oven’s mouth had been or what pattern the bricklayer had used so many years ago. Unfortunately, many twentieth-century homeowners found the “empty” space next to the fireplace in their old house to be a handy place to run ductwork for the central heating. I have been delighted to see some folks haul that stuff out, restore the masonry, and get back down to baking.
A few important factors determine an oven’s basic baking characteristics.
For the purpose of this discussion, an “oven” is a hollow shell of masonry, basically a strategically shaped, mostly enclosed space, intended to be heated by fire for the purpose of baking. The materials from which it is made must endure extreme heating and cooling and the occasional poke with a stick or worse.
Strictly speaking, this defines a “black oven”; one in which the baking chamber is heated directly, and then the fire removed, and the baking effected by retained heat only. The other sort — yes, a “white oven” — is heated by means of a fire in a remote chamber, with flues and dampers controlling the passage of heat. Thus, the baker may fire the oven and bake simultaneously rather than sequentially, obviating the need for stopping and recharging the masonry every so many batches. While a luxurious idea, the white oven is beyond the needs of most home-bakers, but very helpful for a commercial operation. If you are interested in a white oven, take it up with a Masonry Heater Association member mason; he or she will be delighted to hear from you. (See Resources.)
An oven’s proportions — the relationships among the baking chamber’s height, breadth, and depth — contribute to how it will draw and heat. In chimneyless models, one easily determined factor does the most to make or break an oven’s bakeability: the height of the door opening should equal 63% of the interior height of the dome. The authors of a masterful study of the bread ovens of Quebec found that the older mud ovens that cleaved most closely to a key ratio between dome height and door height (preserving the sacred geometry, as it were) consistently drew and heated better than newer, sometimes concrete, ovens whose builders neglected that ratio. Some of the poor performers had been retrofitted with chimneys as compensation, spoiling the inherent elegance of the original design.
Thermal mass is a description of the heat-storage capacity of the masonry of the oven, but can’t be fully understood without its partner, insulation. Grasping this interplay is critical to understanding ovens, so I’ll belabor it a bit in the following model.
For the sake of visuals, imagine the interior space of an oven is a semi-dome. Putting building principles aside for the moment, let’s consider that hypothetical oven chamber in three versions: surrounded by ordinary masonry one inch thick, versus 10 inches thick, versus 10 feet thick. We’ll make exactly equivalent fires in the three theoretical ovens, burning each for three hours. What will be the result?
Oven A, at one inch of thickness, will have absorbed all the heat it is capable of absorbing long before the three hours heating time is up. The surplus heat, that which is beyond its capacity to absorb, is just radiating through the oven’s shell, warming the air around the oven. If you were to take the temperature of the interior oven walls after the fire was removed, they’d be very hot, and the exterior would not be very much cooler. A few loaves of room-temperature dough introduced to bake in this oven might start well, but the oven’s temperature would fall rapidly as the heat stored in the thin shell of masonry moved inward into the relatively cold, wet dough and dissipated outward into the surrounding air. Even if those loaves baked, a second batch from that heating would be impossible.
Oven B, at 10 inches of thickness, is the “just right” straw man in this example. The masonry will have absorbed a lot of heat, although the exterior temperature will lag considerably behind the interior after three hours of firing, and the air around the oven will not be very much heated by the fire in the oven. The hypothetical baker should be able to bake a full range of bread, and many other good things, as the oven gradually falls back to ambient temperature over the course of hours.
Oven C, at 10 feet of thickness, has so much thermal mass that three hours of firing can’t touch it. The temperature of the masonry in the baking chamber may seem perfect right after heating, but that perfection is as short-lived as that of Oven A. Once the fire has been removed from the chamber, the heat that has been stored in the inner masonry continues to radiate outward, into the cold stuff. The heat available for baking is sapped quickly of its intensity.
But where, you ask, is the insulation in this model? Wouldn’t insulation help? In this experiment so far, all three ovens have the same insulation: the air outside the masonry. Air is not the best insulator, but that is how it functions in these models, as the ovens’ thermal break, since air cannot absorb heat as well as masonry can. So, would it improve these ovens to insulate them?
Organizers of English colonies from Ireland to Newfoundland to Virginia furnished their colonists with oven cores manufactured at a few potteries in North Devon. These so-called cloam ovens were set into the hearth walls of houses, at a convenient height for baking, and presumably given a bit more thermal mass in the form of some surrounding daub or rubble to hold more heat than could the oven core’s thin clay shell. This strategy provided colonists an almost instant baking capacity, no expertise in masonry required.
Archaeologists at Jamestown have found several examples of rudimentary ovens just dug into the suitably clayey earth of basements. If properly proportioned, such ovens are perfectly functional except that they are difficult to keep at sustained heat. (Too much thermal mass, not enough insulation.)
French colonies, on the other hand, tended to be staffed with masons who built ovens of stone, clay, brick, and tile, as materials were available. The archaeological record shows these ovens to be good-sized and well-built. In one instance, when the colony’s oven was built, the masons put down their trowels and took up baking, since no men following that profession had yet emigrated.
Oven A would perform differently with insulation, but not entirely desirably so. Right after the firing, it would be fiercely hot and pretty hard to use. True, it would later spend more time in the perfect zone than in its uninsulated iteration, but it would remain a touchy, sensitive creature.
Oven B would make very good use of some applied insulation, retaining its heat longer to provide more production to the baker. It would lose more heat into the bread, and each time the door was opened, than it would to the air around it.
Oven C would not profit from insulation at all, unless a fire were burned many hours longer — long enough to saturate the masonry. Then, and only then, would the insulation really kick in, and that oven would remain at baking temperature for many, many batches of bread. Professional bakers historically used this kind of huge thermal mass to keep their ovens at a steady heat, with occasional firings to sharpen it. Only continual baking renders this sort of oven efficient; it might take days to get the oven fully heated, and likewise days for it to thoroughly cool.
A variable glossed in the above scenarios pertains to materials. The way heat moves through different substances matters. Think about this: heat flows quickly into some materials and tends to pool there, and is sort of rebuffed by others. So by this shorthand reckoning, soapstone and refractory firebrick would be at one end of the spectrum, sucking up the heat, and commercial insulation would be at the other end, resisting it. Most building materials — clay, ordinary rocks, bricks, cement, sand — hold heat, but just less efficiently than special refractory products. And unless you utilize a commercial insulator around (or in) the masonry, it will probably be the first air touching your oven that supplies the thermal break. As you plan your oven, think about surrounding the baking space with heat absorbers, and then surrounding those materials with heat resistors. The less efficient the materials in each category, the more you need of them.
Today’s oven builders have access to far more efficient materials than ever before, and they are a boon to commercial bakers and the masons who build for them. Through online forums, home bakers and DIY masons can tap into the expertise wielded by these generous and passionate professionals, and learn how to use these materials to build really amazing, super-efficient ovens. (See Resources.)
That being said, most of us don’t need our ovens to stay at 460°F for eight hours. In fact, we’re okay with the gentle cooling curve of our ovens, and love the challenge of using up as much of that heat as possible to prepare food.
Just because this is the most personal aspect of planning your oven does not demote it from a level of concern equivalent to the laws of thermodynamics. In fact, understanding the physical properties of the oven and its heating is really just a tool to help you get the oven that will delight you most. We’re not talking about a coat of stucco here. Your aesthetic conviction is a major determinant of your choice of design and materials. It will affect your decision-making from the ground up and the core out.
So look at as many oven images as you can, both recent and historic. What really grabs you? If it is within your means and makes sense for the level of baking you anticipate, follow your bliss. Online resources are such that, if you are in love with an authentic adobe horno, full instructions are out there. If you are a history buff and you have room in your house for a new chimney stack, you can find a mason to build a reproduction of a colonial-era brick oven right in your living room. If your aesthetic sense is horrified by inefficiency, refractory materials and super-insulation will be the way to go.
The ovens I build and enjoy arise from my own particular circumstances. I see in retrospect that I have chosen materials that I love based on my work as an archaeologist and food historian, at an efficiency level that works for me as a home baker. Even the most pragmatic decisions must sort within an aesthetic framework that is comfortable to me. For example, I feel it is critical to insulate beneath the hearth of an oven. Flat rigid materials like insulating firebrick or cellular glass insulation are easily plunked down beneath the refractory firebrick that I favor for the hearth surface. The huge improvement in efficiency wrought by this addition has absolutely zero impact on the final aesthetic of the oven; the only other aspect to balance is cost. On the other hand, I love the finished look of a mud oven; while I know that putting it inside a box and filling that with perlite would really increase my efficiency, I’m simply not interested in looking at that every day.
The size of the baking chamber may be varied according to the needs of the baker; carefully consider your preferences early on. Arrange favorite pans or actual loaves of bread on a surface you are pretending is the inside of your oven-to-be. Measure how much room they take up (with a bit of space between), then add a few inches to the total. Ovens can be built to almost any crazy size; I have used one measuring 16 inches, and another 16 feet, across their interiors. These dimensions are extremes; for most home bakers a diameter in the ballpark of 34 to 38 inches is a happy medium. Too large makes heating a chore; too small is just frustrating to an avid baker.
The interior shape of ovens is also quite variable, but mostly determined by the overall style of construction. The vault of a mud oven, like that of old-fashioned brick and stone ovens, is dome-shaped. Most precast oven cores follow the dome tradition. Many of today’s masons, however, gravitate toward building an arched vault atop short, plumb brick side walls: home-oven-size versions of nineteenth-century commercial ovens. Many do-it-yourselfers emulate this style in the Alan Scott oven. (See Resources.)
The oven’s hearth, the horizontal baking surface, must sink plenty of heat. It also should be both highly durable and easily replaceable, since even a careful baker gives it a real beating between firing, sweeping, loading, and unloading. Most oven-builders use heavy refractory clay firebrick for their hearths. I follow suit in ovens that are not meant as historic reproductions (typically thereby incurring my greatest materials expense). Building reproductions and archaeologically experimental ovens has given me occasion to lay hearths in clay, cobble, and old-fashioned soft brick. (All beautiful but not bulletproof.) The hearths of precast oven cores are usually cast of the same refractory clay as the dome, and are very durable.
If you reject mortaring the hearth bricks in favor of simply laying them in a bed of fine sand, replacing a few worn bricks several years and hundreds of loaves down the road will be easy. You only have to repair an oven hearth once to be grateful to yourself for this choice.
Incidentally, don’t be tempted to use slabs of marble or granite for your oven’s hearth; they simply can’t take the heat. Even heat-loving soapstone may spall at pizza temperatures, and tends to release its heat so violently that it is difficult to bake bread without charring.
A flue, to carry smoke out of the house, is essential in indoor ovens. For the last few centuries, the average New England brick oven was provided with a small flue just inside its mouth to provide draft and convey smoke up into the main kitchen fireplace stack. In earlier years, ovens, inset in the rear or side walls of fireplaces, simply took advantage of that one wide flue. Both types work equally well in my experience, but the more modern version allows for simultaneous full-scale cooking and baking.
Outdoors, a chimney is optional in a well-proportioned oven. On the plus side, a chimney keeps your oven mouth’s arch from being besmirched by soot, if such things trouble you. In the negative column, a chimney creates an opportunity for wear and moisture at a weak spot in the oven. One could argue that, as a needless elaboration — just one more thing to build and maintain — the chimney robs the oven of some of its elegance and simplicity. Worse, it deprives the baker of the opportunity to broil food under the dramatic sheet of flame that can be produced in the entryway of the oven as it heats.
Locating an oven in just the right spot on your site can present a bit of a challenge. Consider each of the following variables and how they might balance in your own situation.
Let’s start with the natural world. Which is the predominant wind direction during the season you anticipate using your oven most? The easiest course, in terms of ease of firing, is to point the back of the oven into the prevailing wind. If other factors persuade you against this choice, you may need to curtail baking on windy days, or employ a windbreak in front of the oven and then expect both firing and baking to take a bit longer than usual.
While you’re thinking about wind, consider your near neighbors. Anticipate how smoke might travel. Once your oven catches alight and is blazing away, combustion becomes more thorough and the smoke is minimal; but sometimes the wrong breeze or the wrong kindling will cause fire-making time to be a tad smoky. Pizza parties go a long way toward easing neighborhood relations; but better yet is to anticipate trouble, and try to head it off at the pass, by thoughtfully siting your oven to start with.
Shade or sun? Siting your oven near a pleasant shade tree may incline you more toward baking on otherwise lazy dog days. The only dangerous heat that should emanate from your oven shoots out the top of its mouth. So a nearby tree is not necessarily a red flag. But do avoid overhanging fire hazards and recall that trees fall down sometimes. A rather sickly red oak standing to one side of one of my favorite ovens has made me a bit nervous for years. This winter, an ice storm blew down the apparently healthy pitch pine five times its size growing next to it. Thankfully, that real crusher went the other way, and the oak still stands, sickly as ever.
Your oven wants a well-drained location. Avoid places that hold water after a rain or that sit too near a runoff area. While you’re looking at topography, notice if you may have a spot that already contains many advantages. A little patch of bedrock showing above the soil may make a naturally dry and solid foundation for your oven. A waist-high heavy-duty retaining wall, a frequent feature of old farms in my part of the world, could supply a handsome ready-made base for your oven.
A mason, if you bring one in to build a large brick-and-mortar oven, or to install a precast core, will probably want to excavate to pour a footing. With that investment of time and money, you may agree that you don’t want your heavy oven to sink or tilt. However, I have always been able to site my mud or stone ovens on solid stony or gravelly ground, sometimes augmenting the gravel beneath to improve drainage and stability, and none of them have budged yet.
What location factors make your oven more fun and easier to use? No matter how well organized you are, you will be running between your oven and your kitchen or other food prep area more than you would have thought possible, so proximity is helpful. Balance your convenience with fire safety and smoke issues.
This little oven faces away from the prevailing wind, stands between an established outdoor entertainment area and the kitchen door, and, most critically, is sheltered from the weather by a decent roof.
Don’t feel that you must incorporate the oven into existing outdoor entertainment areas. First, during its construction period, it’ll be nice just to return to your old fire pit and make flatbread and grill kebabs and ignore your new project. Second, when it is finished, the oven will create its own focus, as your spatial use of it evolves. You may find that you prefer a work table diagonally across from it, rather than next to it, and find that your guests unconsciously gravitate to sitting so that they can see right into it . . . In short, it’s an opportunity to transform a little used and undistinguished area of your yard into a focal point and a gathering place.
What if you don’t have a yard? Many non-homeowners have built ovens on trailers so they can take them with them when they move. In fact, I have seen as wide a spectrum of ovens on wheels as on terra firma — from the cruddiest mud oven to the most sparkling, copper-clad Le Panyol. (See Resources.)
Don’t neglect to plan for the roof. Protect your oven from the elements, especially if it is built with clay-based mortar. Saturation followed by freezing is your dread enemy. And a tarp is not a real solution. When you’re designing your roof, think about how nice it would be to have a covered work table or shelf so that your proofing loaves can stand by, sheltered from the sun and rain.
Whether you plan to build in clay, brick, or stone, most of the principles are the same. Plan how you will protect your oven from moisture creeping up from the ground and falling from the sky. Locate your oven (and elevate it on a base) so it will be comfortable, convenient, and safe to use. Use forms to support masonry elements until they can support themselves. Preserve proper proportions for efficient firing; remember, the more functional your oven, the more innately beautiful it will be.
I am comfortable building mostly in natural materials. As a result, my ovens are cheap and biodegradable. I know that this is individual, but I find them beautiful to look at and am thrilled to use tools built from such deep and long traditions. I am fascinated to think of the future archaeological footprint of each of them.
Unless you want to spend a lot of time crouching or lying on your belly when baking, it’s a great idea to build your oven on a base. For those of us who live in frosty climates, the base also provides a moisture barrier from the ground beneath, protecting clay mortar from freezing injury in winter.
Prepare a level, well-drained site about 4 feet square and wide. In most cases, unless you are building on a very well-drained surface, it’s a good idea to bring in about a half-yard of coarse gravel, and smooth and tamp it down well as a pad.
My favorite way to make an attractive, durable, and cheap base for a small-to-medium oven: a core of 12 concrete blocks provides stability to the body of the oven, and is encircled by a ring of dry-laid stone. Set three blocks on edge on your gravel pad, forming a rectangle. The long axis of the rectangle should be oriented from front to back of your oven, to support the oven’s mouth. Seat very securely and levelly. Add the next course, also on edge, staggering the arrangement of the blocks. Build up courses of stone around, to make a finished circumference of at least 40 inches at the top. As you go, fill the inside of the ring and blocks entirely with small stones and loose gravel. Continue with two more courses of blocks, stone and gravel. (Four courses of blocks all told make a comfortable work height for most people; vary as you like.) Make the front face of the base as plumb as possible for ease in baking.
Stone
If you don’t have access to stone, you can make a very stable, strong, boxy base out of 48 concrete blocks. Set blocks on edge, level. Offset courses, then drive down a few 3-foot lengths of rebar to keep the base from spreading at all. Fill gaps loosely with rubble, stones, or gravel (nothing that will wick up moisture). Below, on the finished base, we’re seeing if we will have enough insulating firebrick for two layers beneath the hearth bricks.
Concrete block
A wooden base works, too, as long as it is heavily built and you use insulation between it and the oven. (Note also the alternative, henge-style oven mouth. No bricks, no forms.)
Wood
This is a basic oven type that has worked well for me; it is functional if not super-efficient, durable despite being made of mud, and at least to its creator, aesthetically pleasing. The monetary investment is minimal. And though there’s quite a bit of work involved, most of it is pretty fun. For best results, plot your ideal oven on graph paper; a plan will help you calculate important factors like how many hearth bricks you need. Be advised that the oven must be thoroughly dry before the onset of freezing weather.
Also known as daub, “mud” in the construction context refers to a mortar made of clay combined with sand and water, usually with the admixture of some organic material like manure and chopped straw. Because the main ingredient — clay from the earth — is so variable in purity, it would be misleading to give an exact recipe; but I’ll demonstrate my favorite way to mix it.
Unlike lime- or cement-based mortars, daub is on a relaxed schedule, and is infinitely adjustable. If you end up with too much sand in the composition, say, just add more of the other ingredients to balance. Worst-case scenario: you build something you don’t like, you take it down, break it up and remix it, and start anew.
You’ll need a lot of daub to build an oven; if you’re working alone, mixing will take up most of your time. That’s just one more reason why oven-building is a nice group project — someone can always be starting a new batch.
The hearth is made of refractory firebrick, a very durable baking surface. They are most commonly available in a size close to that of standard bricks, but we scored these wonderful huge ones while working on an oven for an art center. (They once were part of a potter’s kiln.) Note, toward the rear of the first photo at left, the firebrick that will lie under the oven’s mouth. It forms an apron emerging from the front of the oven.
Start by measuring the height of the oven’s mouth. That figure is 63% of the ideal height of the oven’s center interior. In the oven pictured, the height of the arch was 81⁄2 inches. To find the ideal height for the ceiling, we multiplied 81⁄2 times 100 and then divided by 63, giving us 131⁄2 inches. Cut a stick to that length and use it to gauge the height of your form.
The cracks in the mix on the left say “too dry”; the surface moisture and sagginess of the mix on the right say “too wet”; the mix in the middle says “just right.”
A nice protective plaster can be made by breaking up clay, wetting it to a slurry, and mixing up some finely broken dry cow or horse manure. Be sure to go easy on the water if your manure is fresh! For best results, let this plaster sit overnight before applying it. Apply a coat of the plaster and smooth into final shape. If the oven is ever injured, just dampen the area and reapply.
Try a first fire of small, light, dry sticks, right near the mouth of the oven. Even a wispy little fire gives your oven the opportunity to show off its drawing capacity. Cold air goes in along the bottom; hot air comes out along the top. This is a pretty good fire for a soaking wet oven. A few small fires over the course of drying helps to drive out the moisture.
Be prepared for some cracking the first time you heat your oven. Think of the cracks as added character rather than disfigurement. Do not fill them; they simply want to open and close each time you fire the oven.
Every oven is different, and, especially if you have built your own, you will be your oven’s expert. Every baking session will increase your proficiency in that oven’s particular characteristics.
Wood for your oven should be three things: dry, dry, and dry. Beyond that, I’m flexible and usually burn a promiscuous mixture of scrounged wood. Since many people don’t like to burn pine in their woodstoves or fireplaces, it’s often available as a giveaway in my area. Softwoods are perfectly serviceable for heating an oven for baking bread, so I rely on them a lot. Pine is easy to split into the relatively small diameters that make firing easy.
When I am planning to use the oven for a live-fire application like pizza, I will make a transition from pine to oak or maple about halfway through firing. The hardwood will provide a bed of hardwood coals that will quickly ignite new hardwood fuel to both spike the heat and provide a bit of smoky savor.
Again, scrounging may serve you well here, and is my default mode. Nowadays, if you prefer, tools made just for each purpose are available with a quick online search. While I learned some by looking around at what is sold on the Internet and generally at what other bakers use, I realize that a lot of my baking practice was established by my training at a living history museum, in the seventeenth-century English tradition. Old habits die hard; archaic habits die even harder.
Left to right: Two kinds of peel (aluminum and wooden), a light natural bristle brush, a wooden coal rake, a malkin, an iron poker, and a galvanized tub for catching coals and ashes.
Manipulating the fire. You’ll need something to poke the fire with, and as often as not I find myself just using a random stick. I am careful enough with the masonry of my ovens that I think twice before levering things around with a metal tool. The downside of a stick is flammability, but that’s one of the reasons you have a tub of water standing by.
Sometimes it’s nice to have a metal poker with a hook on the end. Used with care, such a tool is great for dragging coals and embers forward, or removing them from the oven. A chunk of rebar with the last inch or two bent at ninety degrees isn’t pretty, but gets the job done. Make it long enough that you can reach to the back of the oven, but not so long that you are a hazard to yourself, the oven, and all around you.
A once-common tool among European bakers was a long-hafted iron fork (fourgon in French, which collapsed, amusingly, into “fruggin” in English), used to manipulate the fuel in the oven. These implements were especially handy when bundles of small sticks or gorse were the primary fuel.
Moving small coals, embers, and ashes. When it’s time to clean the hearth for baking, I use a lightweight wooden tool I call a rake to drag hot stuff out of the oven. It’s really just a trapezoidal board (shaped to get into the corners of my ovens) mounted on the end of a stick. (To be honest, it’s based on an illustration from an English work of 1688.) It doesn’t burst into flame if I wet it then let it drip pretty dry before using.
Modern bakers use a rake-like scraper with a steel blade for the same purpose. I do not covet this tool for my ovens because, as I mentioned above, I am leery of damaging the masonry with too much harsh metallic scraping, and I love how the custom-made wooden rake nestles right into the edges of the hearth, sweeping the coals and ashes from the base of the oven walls.
Sweeping/swabbing the hearth. Once again, I admit to seventeenth-century influence here, in that I will occasionally resort to using a damp swab, made of linen or hemp canvas strips tied on a stick, to sweep out the oven. In seventeenth-century England, this tool (along with a raggedy hag-like woman) was called a “malkin”; Dr. Johnson reported “scovel” in his dictionary (endearingly pronounced “scuffle” by twentieth-century English bakers). In any case, if necessary, I deploy a malkin to swiftly brush out still-burning embers that the rake misses. Then, to avoid wear on the hearth from the wet swab, I resort to a light natural bristle brush (like a gigantic soft toothbrush on a long wooden handle), the gentlest possible sweeper. Mine have been cast off from a local wood-fired pizza restaurant, seemingly discarded because of a little wear on the end or because they had been on fire. (I saw the defective part off.)
You can buy brass brushes from pizza-tool dealers, which of course will not ignite, but may be a bit rough on the masonry if you are a nervous nelly like me. Sometimes people will follow the brass brush with a damp towel. Do be sure to squeeze excess moisture out of anything you use for swabbing the oven clean.
I have also gotten in the habit of dry-sweeping the oven clean just before and after the “soaking” period (the roughly 20-minute rest period between firing and baking). This practice really seems to minimize the need for introducing any wet tools.
Peels. I use a variety of peels, depending on the work. First, I use a lovely handmade wooden one, just the right size for my needs, for introducing the raw foods into the oven.
Then, I use an old aluminum pizza peel (that’s right, cast off from the same pizza place) to retrieve things. Its finer edge makes it easier to slide under everything, especially, naturally, pizza.
It’s important to have a narrow peel-like tool you can use to turn or move pizzas deftly or peer underneath them while they bake. They make a cute steel lollipop-shaped tool for this purpose, but I get by with a long clapboard with a very fine edge on it. (I also use that clapboard peel for loading couche-risen baguettes into the oven one at a time.)
A new oven’s first heating is likely to be its trickiest, all other factors being equal. Some new ovens just take right off, but it is not unusual for a new oven — especially a good-sized earthen one, which can hold a lot of moisture — to be a bit sluggish to heat. Even persuading oxygen to enter the oven to keep the fire blazing can seem difficult in a wet oven. A couple of firings may be in order before such an oven is ready for baking.
Make sure the area directly in front of the oven is clear of combustibles, and have a bucket of water handy, so that you can extinguish any small stray fires on the ground. These are most liable to occur when you scrape live coals out of the oven, preparatory to baking, but it’s a nice idea to be thinking about safety before you strike a match.
Use a knife to make a good pile of light pine shavings.
Have plenty of nice light, dry pine, split up small (about an inch square on the end).
If you are planning to do some live-fire cooking, and not just to use the residual heat to bake bread, have some small hardwood on hand for later.
Remembering that oxygen is a key ingredient here, kindle a small fire using an airy stack of the above ingredients directly inside the mouth of the oven. Feed it to establish some good combustion. When all seems well, use a stick to push the fire back several inches. Push on the lowest fuel in the fire, and try not to collapse the whole structure. Usually, this takes the fire aback a bit, but arrange things as best you can, adding small amounts of fuel gently.
Now is a good time to notice how your oven draws in air at the bottom, and exhausts through the top of the doorway. (Or exhausts through the chimney if you have one.) When a fire is operating on the edge of oxygen debt, think about any little thing you can do that may help. For instance, structuring your fuel as openly as possible atop two supporting sticks running from front to back under the fire leaves an opening below and plenty of air room throughout.
Continue to inch the fire back until you can get strong combustion in the center of the oven. This slow approach may not prove necessary, but patience at this point can save a lot of frustration if your oven is balky. Once you have a bright stable fire in the center of the oven, it’s usually just a matter of feeding it one or two pieces of larger wood at proper intervals. At this point you can leave it alone to do its thing while you go about some other business. You’ll get a feel for when it’s time to add new fuel.
After a while (in a dry oven, maybe an hour or so; in a clammy new oven, much longer), you’ll notice that the ceiling of the oven over the hottest part of the fire is nice and clean. The soot from the fire has burned right off, the first indication that your oven is taking some heat. By this time, the fire is burning differently and very aggressively. Newly introduced fuel catches almost before it touches down. Give the fire a final push right to the rear of the oven. Keep burning this sprightly fire until the entire ceiling is clear of soot.
Check in with the timetable for your bread. With my ovens, I assume that from this point — when the fire is burning sweetly and the masonry is clear of soot — it will still be close to an hour before the bread goes into the oven. That includes about half an hour for the wood burning in the oven to be consumed, and then about 20 minutes of “soaking,” allowing the heat to equalize throughout the cleared-out oven with the door closed. The fire can be fed and extended if need be to accommodate your bread’s schedule; it’s dicier to rush things.
When the last fuel is mostly burned, rake out the majority of the coals into a fireproof container. I sometimes use a metal hook for larger items, but prefer wooden tools as a rule, as they are less liable to damage the oven. Naturally, wooden tools are also quick to catch on fire if you let them, so it’s a good habit to immerse them in water while the oven is heating. Likewise, I start soaking my pine oven door as soon as I start my fire; a thoroughly wet door is not only less likely to smoke and smolder from the heat of the oven, it also provides a lovely steamy atmosphere for the bread to enjoy. Moisture early in the bake promotes open cuts, prodigious oven spring, and thin crispy crusts in your loaves.
Once the coals have been raked out of the oven, I have a look inside. If it’s really pretty clean, which is often the case if softwoods, which leave no coals, have been used for fuel, I’ll just close the oven door. Only if many small coals remain in the oven at this point, will I use the malkin or scuffle. This tool must also be soaked to keep from igniting; but never just slop it into the oven soaking wet. For the preservation of your masonry, and to keep the best heat in your oven, allow the malkin a few minutes drip dry, or squeeze it out, before use. Quickly swab out the coals. Don’t worry about every last ash at this point, and mind the malkin doesn’t flip burning coals at you on the out-stroke.
During the “soaking” phase which follows (20 minutes in my ovens; you’ll discover the correct interval for yours), the oven undergoes an essential balancing activity — the ceiling drops from blazing hot, and the floor creeps up from a bit too cool, and ideally they meet at around 500°F. This period is also useful to the baker. This is the time when I make sure that everything required for getting bread into the oven is right at hand and ready to go. Aside from a peel and a hearth brush, you may need a lame, razor blade, or small sharp serrated knife for slashing the bread; some semolina or fine cornmeal to ease the bread off the peel; and, of course, the proofed loaves.
When the time is up, if you have a wooden door, place it back in water to continue soaking, or, quite possibly, to quench any incipient ignition. Use the dry hearth brush to sweep the entire oven clean, swiftly zipping along the edges where ashes and coals can hide. The second that the dust has settled, load in your loaves, slashing them on the way in. (If there is any delay here, simply reclose the door.)
The sequence of oven-heating events I describe in Heating an Oven proves similar across a range of disparate oven types, with the main variable — how long it takes to get from one stage to another — being just that: highly variable.
The circumstances that make an oven heat quickly are these: being warm from a previous baking, being thoroughly dry, having less thermal mass to heat, being perfectly proportioned, and having good insulation.
An oven’s heating is slowed down, not prevented, by moisture, cold, wind, mass, poor insulation, and design flaws.
You are facing down the mouth of a freshly cleaned out oven after its 20-minute “soaking” period; how do you know the temperature? Historically, many accounts describe bakers judging heat by introducing objects into the oven and then counting to see how long it takes them to burn. Pieces of paper and handfuls of flour are frequent candidates for this treatment, but the all-time most-popular choice is the baker’s hand or arm. In most accounts, oven heat that could be tolerated for 10 seconds of arm-time was judged suitable for baking.
However, most good bakers of the past probably also observed subtle and hard-to-describe signs the oven and fuel gave during firing; my interpretation is that these frequently quoted “how-long-it-takes-for-ignition” rules — which do work, after all — were great to fall back on when distracted by extraneous issues, like strangers and children asking questions about how you know when the oven is hot enough.
With experience, you will learn to read your oven’s signs during firing and see that the way it takes heat influences the way it gives it back during the bake. Thinking about it in retrospect, I realize that I initially learned to judge the temperature of an oven by observing food cooking in it. For example, if a big apple pie baked in under an hour, I’d know there was still plenty of heat left for something else.
Thermometers. I once tried to test for hot and cool spots in a masonry oven with a standard bimetal coil oven thermometer. It didn’t take long until it was fried beyond all using. Our ovens just get too hot for the “classic” oven thermometer to handle — and that’s even after the fire has been taken out.
Today’s laser infrared thermometer, which can be used to measure the temperature of even a remote object, has made this kind of testing easy. These toys are tons of fun to mess around with and really take the guesswork out of learning how your oven fires, where it loses heat, and so forth.
Remember, though, that as awesome as your laser thermometer is at showing you the current temperature of any surface at any one moment, it does not entirely render obsolete your own senses and experiences. Your oven has its own particular heat-retention characteristics, and will tell you with subtle cues how long it is likely to linger at a certain temperature.
Further, each firing of your oven will have a distinctive cooling curve, depending on how long the oven was heated, the ambient conditions, and other variables. It’s useful to think of an oven’s heating as “deep” or “shallow”; each one has its place, but it’s unfortunate to mistake one for the other. The infrared thermometer is a great tool. Use it to learn your oven’s characteristics and develop an understanding that will allow you to anticipate your oven’s next move.
Way before the oven is heated enough for pizza, let alone bread, you can cook all sorts of foods right in the mouth of the oven, or just inside, near the fire. Fun to do and beautiful to watch, this technique makes efficient use of the fire you have to burn anyway, and so feels virtuous to boot. When I’m planning to make pizza, this is how I deal with any toppings that want pre-cooking, like roasted peppers or Italian sausage. It’s also a good way to entertain or keep busy any early guests.
As it heats, the oven passes through a few phases that make it more suitable for one food than another. I’ll try to describe them. But as with so much having to do with your wood-fired oven, there’s a lot of latitude, and once you know the temper of your own oven, let your own expertise and imagination be your guide.
As soon as a fire is steadily burning in the center of the oven, you have what I think of as “the broiler setting”; that is, a great deal of heat is washing over the ceiling of the oven and out the top of the mouth. This phenomenon is especially pronounced in ovens built without chimneys (like all of mine); when the oven starts to crank, it’s possible to get a sheet of flame to pass within a few inches of your food. This intense heat is not beneficial for every food item, but if you choose wisely, you can develop some very wonderful flavors through its application.
Vegetables that you want to char and peel, like tomatoes, peppers, garlic, and onions, work very well this way. Or quick-sear asparagus or green beans tossed with olive oil and salt.
These are money in the bank. I make them every time I bake throughout our all-too-short New England pepper season. They are wonderful on pizza, or in pasta dishes, soups, appetizers, or even virtually straight-up as a salad.
Most peppers are suitable for this treatment, depending on how much picante you like in your life. I like a mix of sweet (Italian frying peppers like Marconi or Jimmy Nardello) and medium to medium-hot peppers (poblano, New Mexico, Hungarian wax, and jalapeno); much as I love scorchers like scotch bonnets or habaneros, their thin walls and subtle flavors make them better, and easier to modulate, as a raw addition to a dish.
Toss 11⁄2 to 2 cups roasted pepper strips with a tablespoon of olive oil and a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, and kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Add nothing else or maybe a few tablespoons of minced parsley, cilantro, or tarragon. Or a clove of crushed garlic and 1⁄2 to 1 cup feta cubes or sliced goat cheese and a sprinkle of fresh thyme leaves. Or some kalamata olives.
Makes about 13⁄4 cups
This very mellow salsa is great for huevos rancheros or ladled into a bean burrito.
Serves 2
Crack 4 fresh eggs gently right into the sauce to poach over low heat. If you like, grate some cheese over them and cover for 3 minutes. Meanwhile, quickly fry 4 corn tortillas in a small amount of oil to make them pliable. Arrange 2 tortillas on each of 2 plates and carefully scoop out the soft-cooked eggs and their sauce to top. Scatter chopped cilantro and scallions or sliced white onion over.
Makes 13⁄4 cups
This is an intensely flavored sauce, a tasty spark for grilled lamb chops or flank steak. If you find its bitter note too much, balance it with a little pomegranate molasses.
Once you have pushed the fire all the way to the rear of the oven, and it is burning viciously, there should be lots of heat and plenty of room in front of the blaze to cook. The heat at this stage is less flame-y than the earlier phase, but still delivers a powerful sear on one side of the food. Many sorts of vegetables can be roasted in this heat. Small-diameter meats like sausage, poultry livers, shellfish, and finfish all thrive in these conditions.
So let the oven do your prep work; this is the time to pop in things that have a little more bulk and need more than superficial searing. It is also an opportunity to make a pretty effortless tasty appetizer.
Serves 5 to 6 as a robust appetizer
Southeastern Massachusetts is blessed with many great Portuguese restaurants. This simple recipe is inspired by their great way with clams.
Serves 6 people who like to eat with their fingers
My mother’s been cooking this great recipe for about 30 years, since she clipped it from a newspaper column touting a Providence, Rhode Island, eatery that has long since disappeared. The original was a sauté, but it’s also a natural for the wood-fired oven. Choose a beer that is neither too sweet nor too hoppy.
Clever bakers have long taken advantage of the tremendous heat available toward the end of the firing period, when the oven is already radiating what it has stored, yet is still hosting a mini-inferno within. At this point, the entire vault of the oven has cleared of soot, signifying that the masonry has reached a temperature suitable for more critical live-fire baking.
Some of the most attractive uses of a wood-fired oven, the pizza and its family, fall into this category: foods originating as treats or snacks for those working around the oven on baking day. Previous to the development of the wood-fired oven, the ancestors of the pizza family were breads baked on a griddle or directly on a hot hearth, covered in embers, like those described in previous chapters. The names of these breads point us toward their origins, with pizza looking eastward to the pide and pita lands of Greece and Turkey, perhaps indicating a griddle- or tannur-baked origin. Focaccia and fougasse reveal the spread of the Roman versions of the flatbread originally cooked right on the hearth (Latin, focus) throughout the Italian peninsula and southern France. Strasbourg’s flammekeuche recalls the Roman past; the descendants of the Allemani and Franks there still insist on the proper Roman-style oven and live fire to bake it.
Pizza, of course, has perversely made the leap from a secondary to the primary use for a wood-fired oven in many people’s minds. I have met many folks who were very surprised that you could use a wood-fired oven to bake bread! But, as a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario, one could do a lot worse. The intense heat of a well-fired oven with live flames still curling under the vault does set the ideal stage for the lightest, crispest, most delicious pizza imaginable.
For me, live-fire baking, great as it is, is virtually always just a detour in the path to baking bread, so I bear in mind from the beginning that I want a thoroughly and evenly heated oven waiting for my loaves after we’ve had fun with pizza. Ultimately, I think that you wind up with a better oven for pizza by holding that thought as you fire it up. (Also on the few occasions that I have heated the oven just for a pizza party, I find myself scrounging around the kitchen for something to bake in all that perfect heat after the fun is over. It just isn’t right to let that go for nothing! At least plan to make clafoutis or bread pudding or a cobbler or a pie for dessert.)
So, to heat the oven for members of the pizza family of foods, follow the general method for heating the oven for bread outlined in Getting Ready to Bake. Once the soot has burned off the oven’s vault, transition to all hardwood if you have been heating with softwood or a mix thus far. Continue to maintain a good fire in the middle-rear of the oven. Have on hand plenty of small dry hardwood in stick or chunk form.
Line up all the ingredients and equipment you will need for working and topping and maneuvering the dough, including a clean work surface, your preshaped dough, rolling pin if you like, semolina flour, wheat flour, all your prepared toppings, a wooden peel, a metal peel, cutting boards to receive the baked pies, and a pizza wheel or big knife to cut them.
Make the final adjustment to your fire. Using a metal scraper or hook or poker, push the whole fire off to one side, right against the side wall of the oven. With a scraper and then a nonflammable brush, clean the rest of the oven of all coals and ashes. Arrange the fire on the side so that it continues to burn smartly. Throughout the live-fire baking process, manage the fire with the occasional addition of hardwood pieces. You can continue producing pizzas if it burns down to coals intermittently, but ideally you want to effect the constant licking of flames on the ceiling of the oven.
These last steps must be done immediately before baking. Once toppings are applied, especially, delays on the way to the oven are unwelcome.
Like so much having to do with baking, stretching dough can be fun or frustrating depending on your preparation and attitude. I look at it as something I’ll be improving at for the rest of my life, with hundreds of delicious treats to practice on.
Here are a few pointers for shaping dough:
This is the best part. Launch your pizza or flatbread into the center of the clean part of the hearth. Don’t expect the oven to bake evenly in a live-fire application; you must turn the food part way through to expose the “cool” side to the heat. About a minute after contact, the bottom of the dough should be sufficiently baked for you to use a small peel to spin the pizza and move it to a hotter or cooler spot if necessary.
In a properly heated oven, you may observe the baking process as if it were a time-lapse film, a great learning experience. The crust inflates and browns, the toppings steam and collapse, the cheese becomes a molten pool. The hearth and vault will each be delivering a blast of heat in its own way; ideally the bottom and top of the food will be done at the same moment. Use the peel to pick up the pizza at the last minute and hold it close to the vault if the top surface is lagging behind the crust.
Use a peel to scoop the pizza or flatbread out of the oven and deposit it on a serving board. Cut it into sections but remind your guests that the food just spent a formative 90 seconds in a 900-degree environment.
Depending on the size of your oven, there may be plenty of room to bake more than one pizza at a time. The baking time is so quick, though, that it’s seldom important to rush to load the oven up. It’s nicer to take your time, and keep the heat up, and produce sequential perfect pizzas.
I like to brush the floor of the oven clean when I have the opportunity; scorched semolina is not a great addition to any food.
This base recipe will serve eight people as an appetizer. This estimate takes into account the tendency of most people to really dive into these, even if they know another course is coming. It might serve six as the entree, depending on the richness of the toppings. Leftovers are welcome if you can manage to keep them, but usually guests just keep eating them until they are all gone, even if it takes all night. The recipe multiplies easily to make vast amounts of dough as needed.
If you do not maintain a leavening culture, simply omit it from the recipe. It serves to create flavor and texture as much as to leaven this dough, but perfectly fine pizza may be made without it.
The schedule in Pizza Dough describes the minimum amount of fermentation time for great pizza dough. But you can make your life easier, and your dough even better, by stretching out the process over a longer period, as long as you have a cold place to store the dough to retard the pace of fermentation. Here are two techniques that may be helpful to slow fermentation:
Retard the dough in bulk overnight, or for up to two days. After the second stretch-and-fold, place the dough in a big plastic storage tub (twice the size of the dough — it will still rise) and put it in the fridge. Slow, cool fermentation provides for a great improvement for the dough and lots of flexibility for your schedule. Take out at least 3 hours before pizza-making time. Gather up and neaten the chilly dough, and press back down into a ball. Cover and let warm up for about an hour. Then divide and shape the dough as in the main Pizza Dough recipe.
Retard the shaped dough. Place the boxes of preshaped dough in the fridge for up to 4 hours; they may be rolled or stretched cold, or allowed to warm up some before final shaping. The dough becomes very extensible, and the additional fermentation develops deeper flavor. Equally important if you are entertaining, retarding the dough at this point buys you time when you might be busy with other things like heating your oven, preparing toppings, or enjoying a cocktail with your guests.
The major downside of this useful technique is that it takes a lot of refrigerator room; tricky for many of us. Since I live in a cool climate, I often take advantage of the great outdoors to retard fermentation. Even a summer evening with the temperature in the 60s slows things down a bit compared to a hot kitchen.
These two techniques may be used separately or in tandem. Experiment to find what works for you.
To be honest, many of our favorite toppings have evolved from the “there’s nothing in the house” scenario. For some reason I rarely plan ahead about pizza making, so I seldom have mozzarella around to make the always great classic, pizza margherita (tomato reduction, nice fresh mozzarella, basil leaves, a thread of olive oil). But there is always parmigiano in the cheese drawer, and bits and bobs of other nice cheeses to combine with a few key ingredients. And some of our favorites eschew cheese altogether in favor of other savory ingredients.
Enough topping for 3 medium pizzas
Even very strong-flavored mature arugula is great this way. We like to use our local Great Hill Blue; perhaps you have a favorite from your neighborhood. It is important that the pepitas are raw; toasted ones will burn.
Enough topping for 3 medium pizzas
The underappreciated flavor of parsley takes center stage. Substitute pecans or almonds for the walnuts if you prefer.
Enough topping for 3 medium pizzas
Here we use the southwestern French salt cod and potato mixture called brandade de morue as the base for a very delicious, if unexpected, white pizza.
Makes 6 smallish flammekeuchen, a substantial appetizer for 6
This Alsatian specialty is incontrovertibly a member of the extended pizza family, but the toppings — bacon, onions, fresh cheese, and cream — belie its home in the borderlands between France and Germany. Here is my ultra-mellow version.
4 servings
I almost never set out to make a batch of pide on purpose. Rather, it is a great fallback when I have leftover pizza dough, as I most always have some odds and ends of cheese and fresh eggs in the house. We’ll happily eat it for breakfast, lunch, or supper. This is our home-style version.
If you prefer a soft-cooked egg, launch the boat into the oven without it, making sure there will be room later (using a spoon to create a shallow divot in the filling in the center is helpful). When it’s time to turn the pide, slide the egg in then.
When I first saw the word pide on bakers’ signs in towns on the Anatolian plateau of Turkey, I expected a regional variant on the flat pocket breads (pita in Israel; khubz in Arabic-speaking Levant) so familiar to Americans. While all manner of flatbreads suitable for baking on griddles or tannurs are to be found in Turkey, it turned out that this pide is not really one of them. It is baked in a front-opening, classical-style oven, and is filled with delicious cheesy toppings. Except for its distinctive boat shape, pide recalls the pizza, of which it is certainly a close relative if not progenitor. The Italian peninsula is home to a baffling array of pizza variants. Two from Sicily, piduni and pizzolu, calzone-like stuffed breads, share etymological and culinary roots with Turkish pide, and suggest the connection was made sometime during the Byzantine rule of Sicily, between the seventh and ninth centuries.
Pide is part of the richly developed bread tradition that happens to occupy the region of wheat’s domestication. It is a dead ringer for the Georgian khachapuri, which in turn has siblings and cousins across central Asia.
The dying fire in the heated oven — when your final sticks of wood are burning down to coals and ash — presents a mellower scenario. This heat can be used to cook larger, denser foods that would scorch on the outside in a flamier oven.
One caveat here: be conscious that placing a large cold item on the hearth will definitely drain heat from at least that one spot for at least a little while. Compensate by shifting the food from one place to another at least once during the cooking, and by allowing plenty of time for the heat to equalize during the “soaking” period. An infrared thermometer is very helpful in learning how your oven reacts when used in this admittedly unorthodox fashion.
4 to 5 servings
This is a pretty effortless way to get a fabulous dinner made on a busy baking day. Because you’re really heating the oven to bake bread, it’s necessary to move the chicken around to accommodate proper oven heating, but in reality all this maneuvering is not half as fussy as it sounds.
(If you intend to serve the chicken on toast, this is a good time to make it. Just arrange the sliced stale bread on a cooling rack on a baking pan and pop it in the oven alongside the chicken. Turn the pan end-for-end and the bread slices individually as necessary. Rub each toast with a half clove of garlic and set aside until serving time.)
Large Italian-style eggplant chars and roasts perfectly by the dying fire. The delicious pulp can be put to use in baba ghanoush and other mixtures like the recipes that follow.
Serves 3 to 4 as an appetizer
You’ll never eat store-bought again.
Serves 6 to 8 as an appetizer
Roast the peppers along with the eggplants, then peel, seed, and chop. After that, the whole thing mixes up in seconds with a mortar and pestle.
The oven proves its mettle when the fire is gone. Gracefully returning the heat you’ve piled into it is the heart of the oven’s work.
Any oven that bakes using retained heat is gradually cooling from the time combustion ceases, regardless of its design sophistication in general or its mass-to-insulation ratio in particular. The baking chamber may actually get hotter after you take out a batch of bread and close the door for a few minutes. That’s because you’ve removed the thing that was cooler than the masonry, the bread. Overall, though, the temperature of the masonry can go only one way, and that’s down, until it rejoins the ambient temperature of its neighborhood.
For home bakers this is not a bad thing. Most days I can only use so many loaves of intense-heat-loving bread; the fun becomes using as much of the stored heat as possible for other purposes.
Not only does it seem a waste to let all those hard-won BTUs just dissipate into our already warming world, but also the fact is that pretty much anything baked in your wood-fired oven will taste better than the same thing baked in the metal box in your kitchen. And, fortunately, many foods benefit from baking at lower temperatures than those favored by unsweetened yeast-raised breads.
Following are some sequences I use to absorb the retained heat from my ovens — you may need to adapt them to work in the special circumstances of yours. The challenge is to learn the cooling curve of your oven and to attune yourself to how long you have in the various temperature ranges. Each batch of cold food you place in the oven draws down the temperature, of course, and any time you open the door has an effect; always close it any time you can.
Temperature is not the only factor to consider when planning a baking strategy. Some of the following schemes are mutually exclusive — for example, a moisture-exuding heat-sink like roasted tomatoes will not leave an atmosphere enjoyed by meringues. Granola takes up a lot of room and time. Baked beans should enter the oven while it’s pretty hot and then just sit there unmolested all night; they’re incredible for breakfast.
500°F: The first and most intense retained heat of each firing is almost always used to bake unsweetened yeast- or naturally leavened breads. Many ovens with better insulation than mine will allow several batches of this primary bread.
425–450°F: Yeast-raised breads and cakes that are enriched with dairy products, eggs, or sweeteners bake nicely in this temperature. These need some heat to achieve a good rise, but those enriching ingredients all contribute to a tendency toward rapid browning. They will bake more quickly than in your gas or electric oven, so be alert! Chemically leavened breads like biscuits, scones, and cornbread are also good choices for this temperature range, as are casseroles and roasted vegetables.
400–425°F: Fruit pastries large and small, from apple pie to blueberry cobbler to pear tarts, bake well in this heat. Pastry in general does not benefit from moisture in the oven. This oven temperature is also great for baked beans, which will use up the rest of the heat and may remain in the oven overnight.
375–400°F: Most anything else you can think of — sponge and butter cakes, cookies, bars — are worthy candidates for this oven temperature.
350–375°F: A batch of granola will use up the rest of the heat. Or try reducing apple or pear sauce to “butter” in a wide non-reactive baking dish.
325–375°F: If the oven is good and dry, meringue-based treats will use up the rest of the heat.
If you are already a bread-baker, plunging right into wood-fired baking with your own favorite recipes is the best way to start learning new skills. Formulas you know intimately may have surprising results when they hit the bricks of a wood-fired oven’s hearth. Observing these differences will teach you a lot about your oven’s temper.
If you don’t have a lot of baking experience, you may want to start out with some loaves risen with commercial yeast, like Vienna bread, before diving into the world of natural leavening. And, congratulations on taking your first steps; there’s never been a better time to learn to bake!
Support long hearth loaves like Vienna bread by flouring heavy linen or cotton and flipping up ridges of cloth between and around the proofing dough. For round loaves, line baskets with floured cloth.
Makes 2 large loaves or 32 rolls
Austro-Hungarian bakers, scientists, and farmers revolutionized bread in the 19th century, bringing in technical advances that swept the bread-eating world and became the baking norm. High-protein wheat, commercial yeast, and steam injection all made their international debuts in the loaf we still call Vienna.
Of course you can use your wood-fired oven to bake any sort of bread that you would bake in a conventional oven, and, as long as the oven is appropriately heated, the wood-fired loaf will way outshine the ordinary one. But the rhythm of wood firing cries out for breads with long, slow fermentation. And if you’ve taken enough control of your bread to free it from electric or gas baking, fermenting it with your own wild yeast is the next logical liberation.
Maintaining a nice leaven embroils you much more intimately in the interior life of your bread. For those who bake only occasionally, keeping a sourdough culture going may not make sense, but for anyone who bakes a lot or most of their bread, the practice will not only broaden your repertoire, opening the door to some great traditional European bread styles, but draw you deeper into an understanding of the whole baking process.
Frankly a lot of baloney has been written over the years about sourdough, obfuscating a process that bakers have understood implicitly for many centuries. When I started down this path some years ago, I did some reading and thinking before jumping in. As a home baker, I needed to have a sustainable leavening process — one that I could rely on year in and year out, and that would take no more work than, say, owning a guppy. I was enthusiastic to learn and willing to apply myself, but turned off by common approaches that involved either a lot of opaque mumbo-jumbo or wasteful discarding of great blobs of leaven. In the end, I used a mix of contemporary and historic ideas to come up with a simple system that works in my life. When I started out, I thought it was important to understand every last thing about enzymes and proteins and acidity, and it’s wonderful if you do but, it turns out that this process is far more intuitive than that. Most times, the dough is happy to ferment productively, and when it isn’t, it’s not too hard to figure out why and set it back on track.
You don’t need any fancy equipment, but you will want some organic whole-wheat flour at the beginning. Eventually you can maintain your culture using the unbleached flour of your choosing, but at the start, it’s critical to have the clean complex carbohydrates and naturally occurring microorganisms found in whole grains. The other absolutely indispensible ingredient is pure, unchlorinated, water. If you have your own good well water, you’re all set. If not, use a good water filter to remove residual chlorine from treated water. In the recent past, another option was to let the water sit for several hours in an open pitcher, allowing the chlorine to dissipate. However, some of today’s water delivery systems use new chlorine compounds designed to resist dissipation; filtration may be essential.
Put about 2 tablespoons pure, unchlorinated water in a small bowl. Use a fork to stir in as much organic whole-wheat flour as it takes to make a dough (less than an ounce). Put a bit more organic whole-wheat flour on a clean work surface and knead this teeny blob, incorporating as much flour as necessary, until it’s a fairly stiff little ball that holds its shape.
Take a wide-mouthed container (with a lid) of 2 cups or so capacity. (Glass is great; you’ll be able to spy on progress without disturbing things.) Fill it roughly 2⁄3 full of organic whole-wheat flour. Bury the little lump of dough in the flour, less than an inch below the surface. Place the lid on the container and set aside at cool room temperature (60 to 68°F).
Peek at your experiment. If nothing has changed, leave it alone for another 24 hours. If, however, cracks have appeared in the flour above the dough ball — eureka! life! — you may move to the next step.
Retrieve the little dough-blob — now your leaven — from its floury resting-place. Cut away the crusty outside of the dough and discard. Place the spongy inner bit in a small bowl. Stir in roughly a tablespoon of pure, unchlorinated water, and then as much organic whole wheat flour as it takes to make it back into a dough, then once again, knead it until stiff with more flour. Place your refreshed starter in a small airtight container, like a yogurt tub. Let stand at room temperature overnight.
Inspect the leaven to judge its “ripeness.” It is said to be ripe — meaning that it is the perfect time to either bake with it or refresh it — when the leaven has puffed up to a dome, and just begun to give out in the center. Apply your nose to this question, too. The leaven gives plenty of olfactory cues, and you will learn to interpret them as your friendship deepens.
Ripeness also indicates that the yeast in your leaven has consumed everything it can get from its last refreshment. Refresh it by stirring in a splash of pure, unchlorinated water and as much organic whole-wheat flour as it takes to make it back into a firm stirrable dough.
Depending on kitchen conditions, you’ll probably find that daily refreshments are favored by your leaven (it may become quite exuberant in warm weather and prefer attention twice daily). Graduate the leaven to a larger container as necessary.
You and your leavening culture have entered into a cyclical relationship. You add some water and flour to the ripe culture. This “refreshment” transforms it instantly from an aromatic, collapsingly risen state to a firm, neutral-smelling ball of dough. Then, in a matter of hours, it will rise and fill with bubbles again, and redevelop the complex set of aromas that are the signature of your particular leaven.
In each refreshment cycle, the fermenting leaven increases in volume and develops complex aromas and flavors.
I initially entered the world of natural leavening with the idea that baking bread was the ultimate goal, but came to discover that each loaf of bread — whether splendid or mediocre — has been really just an offshoot, a branch, a trial. I was surprised to find that the leavening culture — and maintaining it in a way that is sustainable in my life — is actually itself the project. The adventure of this relationship reminds me that the food I cook and eat and offer to others is literally part of a much larger natural and cultural web, most of it only visible under a microscope. Working with natural leavening has added a task to each day, to be sure, but its benefits to me are far more than just getting loaves of bread to rise.
Once you have a flourishing starter, you can experiment with other flours. Your leavening culture may be capable of a great diversity of expression, given changes to its diet. Although I have experimented with other flours, I generally maintain a wheat leaven (either white or whole wheat) and a rye leaven. Even these two pets can occasionally overwhelm me and my kitchen, but the breads they make are so different and each so wonderful in their own way, that their maintenance seems justified. Every baker must decide for herself.
To start an offshoot leaven, simply take a small piece of your current one, and refresh separately using the new flour.
Prefermenting rye flour brings out its best baking characteristics, so, as a rye bread lover, it’s easy for me to find the time to maintain that particular leaven. In fact, I find that it moves rather slowly, and I refresh it only every other day. Be warned that it can become shockingly strong smelling if neglected for a day too long. Don’t panic; just refresh.
Time your bread-making so that you are able to use your leaven at optimal ripeness. Fortunately, since these cultures are slow-moving, this window is usually nice and wide. Just remove the appropriate weight of ripe leaven from the container and add to the bread dough as instructed. Refresh the remaining culture and set aside as usual.
Following are a few recipes for some household standbys. These will get you started, but experiment with adding soaked grains, dried fruits, and seeds and nuts to your liking. Also try adding a dollop of leaven to breads you’re accustomed to making with commercial yeast — cut back the dry yeast some and stretch out the fermentation times a bit. You’ll be struck by the improvements to moisture and depth of flavor in everything from oatmeal bread to hot cross buns. Keep a notebook of your experiments, tracking time and temperature, as well as proportions, so that you can replicate your results.
Why use a stiff dough, instead of a wet batter?
Many people maintain a yeast culture in a batter-like slurry, but I prefer the stiff-dough method, which has distinct advantages for home bakers. The process is slower and more controlled, and the activity of the culture is easier for the baker to perceive. The stiffer texture is also slower to respond to temperature spikes, a boon in an active kitchen during hot weather. In fact, during heat waves, I maintain the culture in a kneadable, rather than stirrable, state, to further arrest its action.
How much water should I use?
Naturally, each time you refresh your leaven it grows in size. Determining how much leaven you will need and when you’ll need it is important so that you calibrate your refreshments to produce the right amount of ripe leaven at the right time.
If you happen to bake every day, it will be easy for you to find a rhythm and regimen for maintaining your leaven. Those of us who bake more irregularly — say, only once or a few times a week — will have to use a bit more judgment in refreshing. The leaven enjoys radical refreshment — nothing makes it hum along like being reduced to a couple tablespoons and then being flooded with new water and flour. It’s easy to make a lot of leaven in a reasonably short time. What is harder is to grow your leaven incrementally, controlling each addition so that by the weekend, when you finally have time to bake, you have enough starter for your bread, but are not reenacting a science fiction film on your kitchen counter.
At those times, when I’m not baking very much, when I just want my leaven to be healthy but not to grow in size very much, I’m very chintzy with the refreshments: a tiny splash of cold water and a kneading of whatever amount of flour it takes to make a stiff dough. This skinflint regimen will not keep the leaven in the most flourishing condition, but it gets it through times when you are not baking enough for its liking.
Another strategy I’ve developed to help manage the volume of leaven in the house is to have a variety of baking strategies up my sleeve — including a few recipes that consume a large amount of leaven.
What if I must neglect my leaven?
In the real world of my kitchen, my poor leaven has to get by on the attention I am able to give it; it competes with a great range of other daily concerns, and sometimes loses. Fortunately, these cultures are as tough as they are forgiving. When life conspires against my paying proper attention to my leaven — I know it only takes two minutes, but sometimes there aren’t two minutes left in the day — it will fall into a sullen, literally alcoholic, state. It will sag, and look grayish, and smell sour — really, it could not seem more like a drunk after a huge bender.
Some simple ministrations, though, no more than proper refreshments for a couple of days, and the thing is usually back up to snuff and ready for action.
Can I go on vacation?
If I plan on being away from home for two to ten days, I merely refresh the leaven, perhaps a bit stiffer than usual, place it into an airtight container with plenty of headroom, and refrigerate. This is cruel, but the leaven will survive, and recovery will be a matter of days with regular refreshments.
It pays to plan your baking so that the leaven is quite reduced in size before this sort of treatment. It’s always nice to show up on vacation with a bagful of crusty sourdough bread, anyway.
What about longer storage?
You can freeze a small piece of your culture, and then revive it through regular refreshments. I have also had success following a seventeeth-century method that achieves immortality through mummification rather than cryogenics. Simply knead up a tough little marble-sized beanie of your culture as dry as possible and bury it in a jar full of kosher salt. Label it, because, take it from me, it’ll be hard to identify years later when you return from your adventure. To revivify, rinse off the salty crust and crumble the lump into about a half-cup of warm water. Massage it into a slurry and strain it to remove the chunks. Knead it up to a stiff dough and proceed as usual. No guarantees, but I’ve had it come to life in 24 hours — I’ve never felt more like Dr. Frankenstein!
The ultimate hedge against losing a wild yeast culture you value is generosity: the more friends and acquaintances you get started in sourdough baking with a piece of your leaven, the more insurance you have that you’ll never lose it!
Makes 1 two-pound loaf
Consider this a simple master recipe for naturally leavened baking; infinite variations are possible, using different flours and different proportions of leaven. My current favorite employs a good proportion of whole-wheat flour and half rye leaven and half wheat leaven.
Loaves like these that spend a long time proofing benefit from the support of a basket. I use the world’s cheapest split-bamboo baskets, lined with a loose light cotton or linen cloth. If you feel flush, you can spend the equivalent of a dozen loaves of bread to buy one purpose-made basket (a brotform or banneton). It’s up to you, if you are a home baker. I’ve been using the same mismatched chintzy baskets for many years, and when my bread is subpar I wish I could blame them; but, sorry to say, it’s all me.
These proportions make one medium-sized loaf of bread but can be scaled up to fill your oven easily.
Gently stretching and folding the dough during fermentation develops structure without incorporating superfluous flour. Let the dough ferment for 2 hours overall, but twice during that period, at 40-minute intervals, you will develop the dough by stretching and folding it. Use a timer to keep you on schedule, and have a bench knife or dough scraper at hand.
Create a taut outer skin on each loaf, while incorporating the least amount of additional flour humanly possible.
Makes sixteen 5- to 6-inch lahmajoon
A favorite from the Armenian bakeries of the Rhode Island mill town of my childhood. You may bake these either with a small live fire or with retained heat while the oven is still plenty hot.
If you have a little extra lahmajoon dough, use it for these home-style Lebanese tea-time or breakfast treats.
Stir together the sesame seeds, sugar, and olive oil in a small bowl. Spread the mixture thinly on the rolled-out dough, and bake live-fire as for pizza or in a hot retained heat oven.
Makes 1 large loaf
I take the trouble to maintain my rye-based leaven because I simply have to eat this bread once a fortnight. Thinly sliced under smoked fish, in slabs with butter, or as a hunk with a bracing bowl of borscht, this hefty loaf features really complex flavor, plenty of chew, and excellent keeping qualities. The addition of caraway seeds to the mix brings me back to my Providence childhood and the seeded rye at the late, lamented Korb’s Bakery.
Note that the fermentation time is very brief. Be sure to take the compact schedule — around two and a half hours, all told — into account in planning the heating of your oven.
Makes one very large or two large flattish loaves
Brown bread is one of the few breads that simply cannot be approximated in a standard oven. It is a great illustration of the alchemy of time — the three or four hours spent slowly setting up from a pallid, quaking batter to a deeply caramelized, mahogany, fragrant, crevassed slab. During that long period the bread spends baking, the ambient temperature and moisture levels of the oven slowly equalizing with those of the bread, a transformation occurs that perfectly illustrates the magical power of the wood-fired oven.
It’s a challenging bread to get to know, however. When it is first drawn from the cooling oven, the crust is impressively flinty and sharp — you’re more liable to cut yourself, than burn yourself, on it. Taking a cue from the ripening process employed on some European ryes, I wrap the loaves in linen and set them aside for two or three days before trying to slice them. Then, sliced thinly and spread with good butter, this brown bread is like nothing else — deep and complex and wonderful. And it keeps improving for a week.
This brown bread was southern New England’s daily bread for literally centuries. Wheat, the preferred grain of English bread lovers, simply refused to thrive in the region. But rye, the European fallback grain for marginal agricultural situations, performed reasonably well. Corn, bred into countless varieties by America’s indigenous peoples for success in many microclimates, was of course best suited to the region; the immigrants quickly adopted it as their principal crop, too, and adapted their cooking and baking to its particular characteristics.
Equal parts cornmeal, rye meal and, sometimes, whole-wheat flour, comprise this naturally-leavened loaf. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a drop of molasses made its way into some folks’ brown bread. As cast-iron cookstoves came in, and brick ovens were left by the wayside, baked brown bread disappeared from all but rueful nostalgic descriptions of the good old bygone days of real food. The corn/rye/optional wheat mixture made its way, chemically leavened, from the oven to the stovetop to become steamed “Boston Brown Bread” — good, but child’s play to appreciate and eat compared to the more austere and nuanced brick oven ancestor.
Makes 2 or 3 dozen crackers
Using a pasta-rolling machine is the best way I’ve found for the home cook to approximate old-fashioned chowder crackers. You’ll want your oven fairly hot — between 400 and 450°F — for the first baking. Then use the last heat — from just above 200°F — to finish drying them down.
Makes 2 medium loaves
When I was young, our family was lucky to be invited to the annual Christmas Eve smorgasbord at the home of our friends the Johnsons. Highlights were listening to Swedish singing both raucous and sacred, sipping grown-up glögg, and sampling pickled herring and crackerbread, meatballs, and Christmas limpa, an aromatic rye bread. Kristina Johnson Guadagni recently revealed a family limpa secret — using potato water in the mix.
4 to 6 servings
From the Mediterranean to the Balkans to Anatolia, innumerable variations occur on this theme — likewise, from season to season, between my own garden and oven. Here’s a seat-of-the-pants version from late summer New England; vary the ingredients any way you like — shell beans, tomatoes, and piles of red peppers are some of our favorites. For greater depth of flavor, roast some of the juicy vegetables — peppers, tomatoes, eggplants — in front of the live fire as the oven is heating.
If you trust your clay pot for sautéing purposes, start right out in it. If you are frightened of cracking the pot, cook the onions in a cast-iron pan and transfer to the pot with the rest of the ingredients.
Makes about 11⁄2 pounds
This is a great use for the inevitable blemished tomatoes at the height of the season. Scoop roasted tomatoes when cool into zip-lock bags and freeze for the rest of the year, as a great base for pasta sauce, salsa, and many other dishes.
Makes 1 pound
This is a mellow and sumptuous treat on fresh bread or toast, in a baked potato, with grilled shrimp . . . like a savory buttercream frosting.
2 to 3 servings
Put this into the oven to sop up the heat after baking some crusty rustic bread for an incredible supper. You must have a top-quality small chicken and the best, freshest new garlic, and a clay pot that just fits it all with little room to spare. The “luting,” the flour-and-water seal for the pot, is a useful technique to extend to other clay pot cookery.
4 servings
I first tasted possibly the most luscious chicken dish ever devised at a dim and nameless East Jerusalem restaurant. One visit, and we became regulars at the place known to us linguistically overwhelmed American archaeology students as the home of Chicken-in-a-Tent.
An ancient Palestinian dish, Mussakhan is composed of tender chicken impressively swaddled in shrak, basted in oniony roasting juices braced with sumac, then finished in the oven until crisp on top, succulent beneath.
What about retained heat baking in the Middle East? Open-fire installations like the saj and the tannur — and the masterful array of flatbreads and layered breads they produce — come to mind when we think about baking in and around wheat’s homeland. But a little more inquiry shows that retained heat may have long factored into the Middle Eastern baking equation, but as part of a mixed strategy arising long before the first “Roman” ovens.
Archaeological evidence attests to the use of an array of baking technologies, but study has not been rigorous enough to suggest reasons for ancient bakers’ choices. Sad to say, archaeologically excavated baking installations the world over are generally scantily analyzed and poorly understood. Lacking good evidence, we can only theorize in lame generalizations that the prevalence of a certain type of baking in any particular place and time was influenced by many factors — the raw materials to be baked, the type of fuel that could be gathered, whether the people were nomadic or settled, the availability of ceramics and iron, and, for the baker, both training in local tradition and exposure to outside ideas.
Because lame generalizations are so hateful, it’s fortunate that some techniques of great antiquity are still in use by bakers today. For example, the tabun is a type of oven dating back to at least the Bronze Age in the Levant; it is still built and used by some Palestinian home bakers. And that’s a very good thing! Without the continuity of bakers in a living tradition, I am doubtful that archaeologists (including this one) would really understand the functioning of this singular oven.
The tabun is hand built of tempered clay like its cousin the tannur; its shape, though, is like a little Superdome but with a round hole in the top. The baker heats the tabun in two phases. First, she tends a fire within the dome through the hole on top, heating up the baking surface below — a hearth of special heat-retaining river stones. Once that interior hearth is swept clean and the food has been introduced, a supplementary live fire is kindled on the outside of the dome to keep heat radiating downward and inward toward the food. Archaeologists have not focused on this question sufficiently, but, functionally, it seems logical that the tabun is one missing link between the live-fire tannur and the later retained-heat “Roman” oven. It is also just one step removed from the “baking under ashes” technique investigated in Chapter 1.
One more great thing about the tabun is that long ago, certain brilliant cooks used it to invent mussakhan, one of the best chicken dishes ever (see facing page for the recipe). Since I haven’t built myself a tabun yet, I’ve been using a saj to bake the bread and a front-loading oven for the rest to make a pretty creditable version. Seems involved, but so worth it.
Makes 1 loaf cake
This is just a great cake from mid-19th-century New England. It keeps really well in a tin for a week or more. Bake it in the wood-fired oven after the sharpest heat has dissipated, ideally as the temperature falls from 375°F to 325°F.
Groovy, crunchy oat granola was invented when I was a small child, and somehow I learned to make it by the time I was a teenager. I wish I could give credit to the source. Since I didn’t run with any real hippies back then, I must have gotten the recipe from a hippie cookbook. At any rate, this version, which we’ve eaten for breakfast at our house most every weekday of the 21st century, probably doesn’t bear much resemblance to the recipe I learned in 1971. Try this one, and vary it to your liking, adding, subtracting, and substituting as you like. If you want to add dried fruit, wait until it has finished baking.
It is perfectly suited to baking, almost toasting, really, in a cool falling oven. Be sure that your pans fit through your oven door before you commit. It’s a good use for a foil baking pan, since you can squish it through the door if necessary.
Makes 36 small cookies
These are meringues with soul. They want to use the last heat in a bone-dry oven, but you can make and pipe the cookies 3 to 5 hours ahead so that their surface dries before baking. Do not attempt in humid weather.
Some foods, like a whole pig in an earth oven, are traditionally left to bake overnight because that’s how long they take to cook thoroughly and to tenderness. But other dishes that traditionally call for long baking were originally the product of cultural, specifically religious, restrictions. For example, the biblical injunction against working on the Sabbath day instigated some great cooking both thousands of years ago in the Bible’s homeland, and, culinarily independently, hundreds of years ago in Protestant New England. In both cultures, religiously observant cooks came up with dishes for which all the prep work could be done on the day preceding the Sabbath. An earthen pot containing the meal would be set overnight in a preheated earthen or masonry oven or buried among embers and ashes on a hearth, making fresh, hot food available on the Sabbath without violation of any holy laws. Dishes from both of these traditions have gone on to popularity outside of their original communities.
Even today, some popular, simple, and delicious dishes reveal their overnight-baking heritage in their names only. The modern version may commonly be cooked in metal pots on a propane stove, but dishes whose names translate as “buried” or “hidden” usually have a heritage that goes back to long baking in a clay pot in retained heat. For example, Egypt’s ful medames is a lowly but delicious dish of broad beans served with garlic, oil, lemon, and, tellingly, hamine eggs. Its heritage is ancient, older than its current Coptic name, which means, literally, “buried favas.” If a religious injunction was once behind its technique, it has long since faded; the popularity of the beans, however, abides.
Not every “hidden” food has a religious origin story. For example, some Balkan dishes are purported to relate to events in the quite recent past — thieves roasting lamb underground to hide their culpability as rustlers, World War II partisans hiding their cooking from discovery by the enemy, and others. My suspicion is that these dishes are far older than these stories allow.
3 or 4 servings, and doubles or triples easily depending on your clay pots
Jewish overnight Sabbath dishes are found all over Europe and the Middle East; their names are various, but often carry the implication of being preheated, buried, hidden, or sealed away. Today, they are more likely to be simmered on the stovetop, or kept hot in a slow cooker; a shame, given their ancient clay pot heritage.
In this adafina, some of the Middle East’s oldest cultivars — chickpeas and barley or farro — mellow down with subtle flavors of North Africa. We ate a pot of this after it had baked a mere four hours, and it was very tasty; the second pot, sampled the following morning after 17 hours in the oven, was out of this world.
If you wish to omit the meat, increase the olive oil to three tablespoons when cooking the onions, and add the spice paste to the onions 30 seconds before removing them from the heat. Increase the barley or wheat to 1⁄4 cup.
The eggs are also optional, but they are really one of the highlights of this dish, existing as a dish in themselves, hamine eggs. Counterintuitive to anyone who has ever boiled an egg too long, the texture of these eggs after, say, 18 hours of cooking, is soft and creamy. The yolks and whites have almost merged in distinctive, subtly marbled shades of tan, and the flavor is smoky and rich and unfamiliar.
When your oven has cooled below 300°F, slide in a batch of hamine eggs for breakfast.
Fava beans have very thick skins and take a ridiculously long time to soften up enough to cook. Aside from thinking ahead to soak the beans, there’s not a lot of complication here. You can cook the hamine eggs right in the bean pot if it’s big enough; just make sure you start out with plenty of water, and add a skim of olive oil to the top as in the previous recipe.
The predominant religious strain among seventeenth-century English immigrants to New England was a radical or fundamentalist Protestantism, featuring a renewal of interest in and commitment to ancient biblical laws. The official position was that the Sabbath must be kept free of labor (and entertainment, for that matter), and thus free of cooking. Records show that this injunction seems to have been upheld in most households throughout orthodox New England until the early nineteenth century.
New England houses, even modest ones, were generally furnished with masonry ovens, probably beginning in the 1630s. Home baking, as opposed to a reliance on professional bakers, or the use of communal ovens, was the norm for most households in both country and city. Leaving food “buried” overnight in the center of the huge pile of masonry that was the chimney stack assured at least one hot meal on Sunday morning. While a great variety of foods might have been cooked in this way, only a few were well documented, including baked beans and Indian pudding.
Beans or peas simmered, typically with fatty salt pork or beef until soft and seasoned, were a mainstay of the average English person’s diet in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cheap, easy to cook, and satisfying, legumes were a staple for working people on land and at sea. Tender, kidney-shaped American bean varieties, in a variety of sizes and colors, had been introduced to England well before the English inserted themselves into North America, and they were an instant hit. Easier and quicker to cook and more delicate in flavor than the broad beans available in Europe, they were adopted without the hesitation that accompanied the introduction of other American crops.
Documentation does not exist to inform us when beans first made the jump from the kettle on the hearth to the earthenware pot in the oven, but they probably did so with little change in recipe. Pork and beans survived for a couple hundred years as little more than that: pork and beans. Optional additions by the nineteenth century might be some ground black pepper, an onion, a bit of mustard, and a spoonful of molasses. (Even as late as 1900, recipes commonly called for only one tablespoon of molasses for a quart of dried beans, and that only optionally.)
The New England Protestant Sabbath began at sundown on Saturday night (in some towns, seemingly arbitrarily, a bell rang at 4 p.m. to signal its beginning). It was not unusual for baked beans to be a fixture for Saturday supper as well as for Sunday breakfast. As long as the Saturday baking was in the oven by early afternoon, a pot of beans would be ready to eat by suppertime. Ready, in that they are tender and tasty, but not as sublime as the overnight beans, which turn out super intense and almost caramelized.
For baked beans, make a half recipe of the basic Bean-Hole Beans, and put it in an earthenware pot with a lid. They should have plenty of liquid over them — add more boiling water if necessary. Put them in the oven hot and leave them overnight, or until they have drunk up all the liquid and become incredibly savory.
This very simple Indian pudding is a late nineteenth-century recipe from Plymouth, Massachusetts. It is sweeter than many older recipes, so feel free to experiment with reducing the molasses if you like. These proportions, though, yield a very intense Indian pudding experience; a friend of mine referred to this dish as “the French roast of Indian puddings.”
This can go into the oven after it has lost a good deal of heat, and depending on the heat-retention characteristics of your oven, may bake all night for a delicious treat in the morning. Experiment and you will find a pattern that works for you.