I have been making earthen ovens for over twenty years now. I made my first one in 1991 when I was working with architect Nader Khalili at CalEarth in the Mojave Desert. We were making a lot of adobe bricks at the time (friendly Persian-sized ones – 8â€x8â€x2â€) and also building domes of regular fired bricks. I’m not sure what got it into my brain to make an oven, probably an old picture of the ovens at Taos Pueblo. One day I made a round foundation of adobe bricks in a mud mortar bed right on the ground, then hammered a string in the middle and used that as a guide to lay up a . . .
Alan Scott, Brick Ovens, A Marriage
Alan Scott's Ovencrafters provides DIY masonry oven plans and hardware (doors and pyrometers) for bakers wanting to start their own small business, or just to bake large amounts of bread and other food for family and friends. It was set up on Gandhian principles of “Policy with principles, commerce with morality, wealth through work, and science with humanity." Many ovens and many small bakeries now feed good bread to their communities as a direct result, and the book Alan inspired and co-wrote, The Bread Builders, has become a bible for a growing circle of builder/bakers. Alan, an Aussie . . .
Michael Pollan, a Cob Oven, & the NY Times
Six cooks, no spoilt broth: Mike Emanuel built the oven. Aya Brackett took the photo for the NYT; see link below for the rest of her slideshow. "Communal table: A 36 Hour Dinner Party" The NY Times Magazine recently published this article by Michael Pollan about a 36 hour dinner party cooked in a mud oven. Best, for me, was how he explained the purpose of the oven: The idea is to make the most efficient use of precious firewood and to keep the heat (and the danger) of the cook fire some distance from everybody's homes. But what appeals to me about the tradition is how the communal . . .