| With this niffy, easy-to-make
oven you can bake crusty breads, tasty pizzas and even roasted meats. |
Did you love to make mud pies when you were a kid?
Even if you didn't, you can still build this easy outdoor oven that works as
well as a custome-build masonry or ceramic model. Cost? Next to nothing. Material?
The earth under you feet-one of the best building materials on the planet. Anhd
the skills you need are just the ones you were born with.
Follow these steps outlined below and you'll enjoy crusty, chewy and richly
flavored bread, pizza and other baked goodies in no time.
GET READY
Collect your shovel, a wheelbarrow and/or some buckets, a tape measure, scraps
of lumper, a plastic tarp and kitchen utensils (for sculpting).
To start, prepare a base for the oven. If you're going to use the oven a lot,
you'll want to build the oven floor at waist-heigh. Use what you have-rocks,
broken up concrete, logs, old metals barrel or even sawhorses. If you don't
mind working low, build on the ground.
THE FLOOR
Twenty to 27 inches is a good size for the oven floor, but to determine your
exact needs make a mock-up of what you want to bake and calculate how much space
it takes. Make you oven floor by setting standard red or fire bricks on a level
bed of smooth, tamped sand, 4 to 6 inches deep. Used bricks are great, but should
be free of old mortar. Set the first one level and solid. Hold the next brick
level and just above the sand; gently kiss its long side to the long side of
the previous one. Set it down flat and firm. Don't wiggle it. If one brick stands
up a bit proud, tap it down to make it flush with the rest.
MAKE A FORM
Shape a pile of moist sand on the floor bricks. (This can be any kind of sand,
or even loose topsoil. The form will be covered with your mud mix, then removed
to form the oven's interior.) The form should be a few inches higher than half
the oven floor's width. [For example: An oven 27 |
