Alright! Bird oven has landed in the camp kitchen area, awaiting its final coat of plaster and first firing. This is a pretty compact, efficient, and semi-portable design, as far as cob ovens (traditionally, "horno" in Spanish) go. The neck/mouth is actually a small chimney, not an essential feature of this design as the fire can draft out the door opening too, but a pretty cool one.
We had a successful small one-day workshop with a handful of curious locals to complete the main form of the oven, after pre-building the platform from miscellaneous scrap and wild wood stock. This was a fun "free" project which will see some good use here over time, from neighborhood summer cookouts to actual catered "plein air" farm dinners with wood-fired organic veggie pizzas. You can actually get a lot of baking done pretty quickly in one firing with these ovens, as you go from broiling heat (pizza in 3 minutes!) slowly down to low-temp baking over about three hours after clearing out the live embers.
Much fresh video content in the works here, from the cob workshop, a recent community potluck dinner, the Vermont Village Building Convergence, and a "day in the life" montage from the farm home. Below is a short clip from a few weeks back introducing one key transformation zone below the barn, where the cob oven stands now:
We had a successful small one-day workshop with a handful of curious locals to complete the main form of the oven, after pre-building the platform from miscellaneous scrap and wild wood stock. This was a fun "free" project which will see some good use here over time, from neighborhood summer cookouts to actual catered "plein air" farm dinners with wood-fired organic veggie pizzas. You can actually get a lot of baking done pretty quickly in one firing with these ovens, as you go from broiling heat (pizza in 3 minutes!) slowly down to low-temp baking over about three hours after clearing out the live embers.
Much fresh video content in the works here, from the cob workshop, a recent community potluck dinner, the Vermont Village Building Convergence, and a "day in the life" montage from the farm home. Below is a short clip from a few weeks back introducing one key transformation zone below the barn, where the cob oven stands now: