Our Brick Oven Diary

My husband, Joe, and I had been talking about building a brick oven in our back yard for several years before we finally found the plans. The plans we used are from Ovencrafters. Some of our “Brick Oven Diary” comes directly from letters to Alan Scott, some from my personal journal, plus notes, receipts and sketches we kept while building the oven. We hope they can be a help to those of you preparing to build your own oven. If you have any questions or need more details join our Brick Oven e-mail discussion list.

May 21, 1997 - I am so glad to find you!!! (Alan Scott of Ovencrafters) I have been searching for plans to build a brick bread oven for at least three years. It finally occurred to me to ask on the "Cooks" forum on Compuserve, and someone there was kind enough to direct me to your Web page.

I want to build the oven in my back yard. It is just for home use. I'm not sure which of your plan packages would best suit my needs. Also, I would like to be sure that the required materials are available before I purchase the plans. I am anxious to get started as soon as possible. Thank you being here!

June 10, 1997 - I got my oven plans today. I've gone through the plans (only once so far) and the first question I have is, "what size do I make the oven?" I do want to bake pizza. In fact I may bake pizza more often than I do bread.

June 17 - I have decided to follow the 32"x36" Brick Bread/Pizza Oven plans exactly. I will probably do pizza more often than bread, plus I feel more comfortable following those exact plans rather than trying to modify any of the others.
We have decided we would like to finish the oven in time for our harvest celebration on August 2, so that will mean sticking to a strict schedule.

June 18 - We are getting the materials for the foundation slab tommyrot, and the bricks, blocks and most of the other stuff next week. I can't believe that it is finally happening after all these years of wishing! It is so exciting just looking at the materials!

June 24 - The footers are dug, the rebar, etc. is in place and we are having the slab poured tommyrot. I e-mailed Alan with more questions. So far we are on schedule.

June 26 - Just a note to let you know the pouring of the foundation slab went well. We had a concrete truck come to do it. We probably didn't get the surface as smooth as an expert would have - but it is level and will work just fine I'm sure. Saturday we lay the first of the blocks!

June 29 - This morning Joe started laying the blocks for the oven base. We laid the first cornerstone, appropriately in the Northeast. We put several mementoes inside, including a poem which our daughter, Nicole, wrote in honor of the oven. We had to stop construction to attend a wedding reception and finished up about 1:30am.

June 30 - We now have the hearth slab poured. Even after speaking with you about the vermiculate stuff though - I am worried. I do not know if we mixed it right. We mixed 6 parts vermiculite to 1 part CEMENT (not concrete -
I know we got that right) and enough water for it to stick together, but not be runny. BUT, the sample we left sitting out overnight did not turn into a hard lump. It was crumbly like wet beach sand. I can't imagine how it is going to stay put where it is. I have nightmares of it just all falling down when we take the form boards away. How long do we leave the form under it? Could we have done something wrong? What IS the texture supposed to be like?

We forgot to put the 1/4" cardboard spacers between the concrete blocks and the form boards for the hearth slab. (THAT TURNED OUT TO BE ONE OF OUR WORST MISTAKES) How hard are the form boards going to be to get out? (REALLY HARD) Do you have any suggestions for their removal? (IN BITS AND PIECES WITH HAMMER, CROWBAR AND CHISEL)

July 5 - We are going to do the brick work on the oven today. For mixing the concrete we have purchased a green plastic barrel sort of thing at Home Depot. You put in the bag of concrete, add water, and roll the barrel back and forth for a while and its mixed! It comes in very handy on days we don't need a lot mixed all at once. For those days we are renting an electric mixer from an equipment rental store.

July 6 - We have fallen a bit behind schedule with the oven. We got the wall bricks set, but not the arch of the oven roof. We have to finish the concrete cladding tommyrot because Joe is going out of town and I need to be drying and curing the oven while he is gone.

June 7 - We ran out of concrete 1:30 in the morning so the cladding isn't finished.

July 9 - We didn't jump off of a bridge <g>. Cutting bricks and having them break where we wanted them too was trickier than we thought! And fitting the last few bricks in where the arch meets the front was made more difficult because we had decided to make the oven one brick deeper (because we had the extra bricks) than the plans called for. We realize now why plans shouldn't be changed without careful forethought. We finished the oven itself and have only the chimney and housing to do. We put an electric heater in the oven to begin drying the concrete. We will keep it in there day and night except when we are home long enough to build a fire.

July 12 - We finished mixing concrete and putting it on the oven for the cladding. Tommorow we will take the form boards off of the cladding to speed up the drying of the oven.

July 14 - I lit a small fire in the oven for the first time today. I used a standard oven thermometer to measure the temperature, which was 125 degrees. We had to try out the oven - so we cooked a strawberry Poptart.

July 15 - I made a fire in the oven again this morning. We still haven't done the housing, but I'm glad I made the fire because I found (via smoke snaking out) that there is a hole in one of the less accessible areas near the front of the oven which will need to be patched up both inside and out. Just an amazing coincidence. It's a weird spot near the front that we had to mortar up by feel from the inside, which coincided with a sort of corner of the forms for the cladding on the outside, and we didn't pack the cladding down in that corner as good as we should have.

July 18 - I hope I didn't hurt anything. I started a fire in the oven this morning. It was cold, and I apparently finally got the hang of building a fire efficiently, because I went to take a shower, and when I got back the temperature had gone from around 100 degrees to 500 degrees! The highest I had it yesterday was about 350.

I really love this oven already. Its as though it has its own personality. Like it is a living thing. Do other people experience this?

July 21 - We have almost finished. We only need to do the roof and finish the top of the chimney and the stucco over the blocks. We need to get some more bricks.

We made the front wall one brick higher than the other three walls. We plan to make the roof 3/4 inch plywood with no overhang. We will cover the plywood with tar paper and that mesh stuff for the stucco, including covering the corners where the wood meets the blocks with the stucco mesh. Since the roof will be in at least two pieces, we will support the joint with 3/4" x 3/4" angle iron running from the front of the oven to the back.

We got a load of wood this weekend for firing the oven. I must tell you it was a little spooky climbing underneath that thing to stack the wood...thinking of all the tons of brick, block and concrete over top of me held up by, what look like, rather spindly 5/8" re-bar...

July 27 - We are (almost) finished! I think the only thing left at this point is a final coat of stucco over the concrete blocks. The only other thing is I'm not sure if the chimney is ok.

The oven is 31 1/2" wide and 40" deep (to the inside of the door). Right now the chimney is 38" high (from the top of the door opening). The top of the chimney opening is 12"x5".

We made a fire in it today, filling the oven about half full of wood, just to see how it worked. Our fires up until now had been fairly small. The smoke went of the chimney nicely until a breeze kicked up and then some of the smoke seemed to be blowing back down the chimney and out of the front opening. It wasn't too bad, but the breeze wasn't very strong either.

After raking out the ashes and coals (I'm not sure if I let them burn long enough). I put my oven thermometer in and closed the door opening. The door is a almost 2" thick solid piece of wood. After about 15 minutes I check it and the temperature was 575 degrees. We didn't have anything ready to bake, so I put some slices of bread I baked yesterday (in a regular oven) with some Cheshire cheese on a pan and stuck them in there and closed the door again. After about 5 minutes it was done and
it was great! After all the door opening the temperature had dropped to 550. I put the door on again and checked the temperature after an hour. It was 450.

July 28 - We kept the door shut on the oven and this morning (16 hours after first measuring the temperature) it was still 175 degrees.

July 29 - I'm impressed. This morning (41 hours after starting the fire!) the temperature in the oven is 140 degrees. It holds heat amazingly well! I am looking forward to doing some REAL baking this weekend.

July 31 - I finally tried baking some bread in The Oven last night. I think it was too hot when I put the bread in (400 degrees), which prevented "oven spring". I checked it after half an hour and it was done and the top crust a little over done, but it was wonderful to me! I had never been able to achieve a crispy top crust in a regular oven and I always wanted to. I only cooked two loaves, and did not put any extra pans of water in. I wanted to see what would happen, and the top crust was too hard and dry. I cooked them in bread pans (which I believe are aluminum).

August 2 - Joe was still putting the final coat of stucco on when I needed to start the fire for today's cooking, but we met our completion date! In the wet stucco over the Northeast cornerstone we scratched the date when we set the cornerstone, today's date (for the completion of the oven) and a S&C.

We practiced making pizza (since we've invited many folks for a pizza party next weekend we thought it would be a good idea to practice <G>). I suspect the oven must have been around 900 degrees when we cooked the pizza, since it cooked in about 3 minutes. It was wonderful! We used a combination of Mozzarella and Fontina cheeses. I'm not sure how to handle the fire for pizza though. I loaded the oven with wood and when most of the flames had gone out I realized that I needed SOME flames still going. I pushed most of the coals to the back and the flaming bits to one side, leaving room for doing about one pizza at a time. I waited too long to add more wood though, because when I did all it did was create huge amounts of smoke!

Anyway, after we did pizza I baked several loaves of bread and some cornbread. I baked the cornbread in a 14" iron skilled and it turned out great! We also baked some cookies and a special loaf of bread for a harvest celebration. I LOVE this oven. I go outside and just stare at it every chance I get. We finished the final coat of stucco and decorated it with some tiles.
Is there anyway to get mortar off of bricks where it doesn't belong? That's the only problem. We did most of the brick work at night and didn't realize how bad it was until it was too hard to wipe off. (AND WE STILL HAVEN'T GOTTEN IT OFF - CLEAN THE BRICKS AS YOU GO!!!)

August 11 - Our oven got a good workout this weekend! We had 36 people for pizza yesterday. I made pizzas for 2 ½ hours straight. Everyone loved it! I had made up 12 loaves worth of whole wheat dough, and had four loaves left so I baked those late last night. The dough had risen and been punched down about four times throughout the day, and the loaves sat and rose for about 2 hours waiting for the oven to cool down enough, but the bread still turned out great! This time I remember to spray water in the oven (on the loaves and bricks) several times in the first 8 minutes and got that wonderful chewy crunch crust I've been looking for.

August 21 - I finally got the ashrake the day before yesterday! (this was in the middle of the UPS strike) It came one day too late for my last baking, so I won't get to try it out until we've consumed these 10 loaves of bread. I am gradually getting used to the oven. I realize I must start the fire much earlier than I have been. I wind up raking out coals instead of ashes and cooking in too hot an oven, because the dough is getting over risen and its getting late (I finished baking around 2:30 am). We let the loaves cool thoroughly then wrapped them tightly in heavy duty aluminum foil and froze them. (I have also used those freezer bags with the zippers. They work just as well)

September 28 - We baked bread, cornbread and apple pie in the oven. I was a little nervous about putting the glass pie plates onto the hot bricks but they worked just fine. They pie plates were dry and at room temperature.

October 13 - 1:21 am, we just finished baking eleven loaves of bread and a chicken. The oven didn't fire up as easily as usual. The baking should have been done by 4 or 5 pm, but the fire went out while we were out running errands and we had to start it over again. I finally got some ovenspring though! I poured a cup of hot water onto an empty pan in the oven and I also sprayed inside the oven and on the loaves every minute for eight minutes. This involves using a spray bottle and watching a watch. Exactly every minute quickly open up the oven, give several quick squirts and shut the door again.

The chicken weighed 6.38 lbs. and cooked in two hours at about 350 degrees. I put a piece of foil over it lightly for the first 45 minutes. It was brushed with garlic oil and salt.

November 27 - We cooked most of our Thanksgiving dinner in our brick oven including a 25 lb. turkey, several pumpkin pies, several loaves of bread, garlic (in a garlic roaster) and a sweet potato casserole. The oven started cooling down before the turkey was done so we had to transfer it to the indoor oven. The bread turned out great this time. We finally have the time for firing up the oven figured out: 5 ½ to 6 hours from start to raking out the ashes. At that point the ashes are almost all white with some glowing bits, rather than hunks of coals we had raked out before. (I think Alan told us this, but we had to find out for ourselves) After raking out it took another hour or so to cool enough to put the bread in.

December 21 - I baked 14 loaves of bread in two successive batches. The oven would hold that many at a time, but I only have six loaf pans and a few peels. The bread in the pans go into the back of the oven and the hearth loaves go near the front. That way I can easily see what I'm doing when I jerk the hearth loaves off the peels. I still need some practice at that.
We had 42 friends over and served the bread with home-churned butter and vegetable soup cooked over an open fire in our biggest cauldron.

December 31 - We cooked Naan (a type of flat-bread) in the oven to go with our curried chicken dinner. Everyone wants to know when we will have that again - it was so good, and fun to cook too! The naan recipe calls for pricking it with a fork, but I found it more fun to leave it unpricked so I could watch it puff up like little pillows.