Clay outdoor bread oven??

[DennisK]

Congratulations erinszoo your oven looks great! I hope you keep this thread going as I would love to see a picture of one of your loafs of bread as it comes out of your new oven. How does it work; do you move the coals to one side and put the dough on the other side?

 

[erinszoo]

Plan on keeping this thread going. Would love to see other peoples ovens as they build and bake too! You build the fire in the oven and then push the coals to the sides. We built two pockets into the back of the oven for the coals to go into while we bake. We're planning on building the outer layer of the oven this weekend so I'll have new photos to post. I'm ready to use it for sure. We kind of got sidetracked because we had to stop and build our greenhouse because we got an early freeze so the oven got back burnered for a week or so.

 

[erinszoo]

Getting ready to go out and do the outer layer of cob on the oven. We've been building fires in the oven to make sure it is good and dry and it is heating up really well and holding heat pretty well even with only the base 2 inch layer. Hopefully this outer layer will dry pretty quickly too and we can start baking bread and pizzas and ...

 

[suncatcher]

I have been looking into this too. There are many you tube vids that show you how to build it from the ground up. I think if you don;t have a cover over it, such as a wooden roof, you have to use lime on the outside, but not 100 percent sure. You heat it with wood then push the wood to the sides. This also shows you how to tell if your oven is hot enough to bake bread, by checking it with corn meal.


Here is a good link on how to build it .

 

[suncatcher]

and how to bake bread in the earthen oven...

and a workshop on how to build an earthen oven, this one is a three part

this one shows you from the ground up, I thought it was very good.

 

[DennisK]

I’m not at a place where I can start my own bread oven yet, but hopefully I will be able to incorporate it in a stone wall DW wants me to build. That is part of a garden expansion project she has me on now. In the mean time, I have been experimenting with baking bread in a conventional oven.
I am sick and tired of spending close to $5 on a 4 ounce jar of yeast; so I am learning about sourdough starter. It took me a number of tries, but I finally have a batch bubbling away in a one gallon jar. It smells very much like sourdough. Last evening, I kneaded dough containing about 2 cups of the starter, but in the morning, it hadn’t risen very much. After the second rising, I baked it and was rewarded with a heavy compacted loaf. The taste was what I was looking for, but I need a good deal more air pockets in the bread – a much lighter loaf. Tonight, I will try again, but with three cups of starter. If anyone has some experience with sourdough, I can sure use some advice.

 

[erinszoo]

On sourdough, DennisK, stick with the two cups of starter since you like the flavor, then you have a couple of options to get a lighter dough. One, because sourdough is a SLOW riser, you can leave it to rise for much longer than you think you need, or you can add just 1/4 tsp to 1/2 tsp fresh yeast to the dough. You'll use way less yeast than normal but you'll get a faster rise. Just for note ... we buy yeast in bulk at Sam's club in one pound packs (you get two packs together) for like $6. Way cheaper than buying it at the grocery store. They come vacuum packed like coffee and we open the pack, put it in a quart size jar, and keep it in the freezer.

 

[DennisK]

Thanks for the tip, erinszoo! I don’t know why I didn’t think of shopping around for better deals on yeast – daaa . Sam’s Club isn’t in my area, but I found a comparable deal in Amazon – 32 oz for $8.89 plus shipping. Buying that, and using ¼ of the recipe’s volume along with my starter, brings the cost of yeast down to where baking my own bread makes better economical sense.
I found that I will need to keep my sourdough in a sealed container. Because it takes a lot longer to rise, the surface of the dough dries out. The dry crust of the dough restricts its expansion. This will be tonight’s experiment.
Oh, and I also found a YOUTUBE about kneading the dough for a lighter bread. She stretched the dough out before folding it over to be rolled in. She claimed that stretching the dough elongates the gluten which is suppose to promote a lighter bread.

 

[wyoDreamer]

I have found that adding wheat gluten also helps to make a lighter bread.
I haven't had any luck making pure sourdough bread without additional yeast. I haven't had any luck with sourdough recently, it always turns on me since we maved out here to Wyoming. We must have a very prevelant wild yeast present that takes over.

 

[DennisK]

I can relate! My previous attempts at creating sourdough starter were unpredictable. At times, I would get some very foul concoctions. But then I came across another YOUTUBE film which worked very well for me:

The baker placed raisins in a jar, and then filled the jar with water to about 50% full. A lid sealed the contents. After about 4 days, my raisins floated to the top and were giving off small bubbles. At this point, the raisins were strained off, and flour was added to the remaining water. I made my batter about the same consistency of pancake batter. In about a day, the mixture started bubbling and it had, and continues to have a wonderful sourdough smell.