December 10, 2006 - 9:24pm
Greetings from the Niagara Peninsula
I'm in a tiny farm community named Caistor Centre, pretty much 1 hour from anywhere in the golden horseshoe area :)
I've been perusing the site for a couple weeks and am very impressed with the wealth of knowledge and helpful spirits!
I've been baking and cooking since my mother taught me when I was a youngster and have loved it ever since over the past 30 years.
I don't have an active site or blog yet, but my convection oven and soon to be roofed cob oven are :)
I'm mostly using Millbrook organic flours when i can get them, or anything else when in a pinch :)
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Tell us about your cob oven! I just built an oven from kiko denzer's this summer, and love to hear about other folk's projects as well.
I finished mine this past summer as well, also from Kiko's book!
Mine still needs a plaster, we haven't decided on which type, maybe patina or maybe lime?
And it needs a permanent roof as it has a simple canopy over it now. I have a lot of white oak limber which I thought might make a good roof, it's rot resistant but weighs about a ton when measured 2 inches thick and spread out over 10' by 7' so I'm building a tin roof as we have lots of tin roofing being on a farm and all ;)
I've noticed one stone in the bed has a raised corner but I can tap it down and since the bed is 44" across it shouldn't pose a problem.
Next year we want to build with more attractive materials, add a chimney, and/or maybe a separate burn chamber.
Here is my wife's blog detailing it's construction http://thesilverwheel.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html
Would you tell me what your oven is like?
Sites like that are so handy for new builders. When I was working on it--I would flip through my bookmarked oven sites and just look at details like foundations, or doorways, or mud color, ha ha.
We built ours this spring and summer as well, so we're probably at the same level of practice with it. We built a metal roof over ours, but don't have the final plaster either--can't decide what kind to do. Ours burns quite well without a chimney, though you do have to start it slowly and towards the front at the beginning. It's taking about 4-5 hours to get the oven hot enough to bake several batches of bread, and I'm getting the hang of how it's supposed to look and feel when it's ready. it holds the temperature for a long time afterwards, so the long heating process is worth it in the end.
Strangely, one of my favorite things to make in it is granola! It seems to taste better than in the regular oven, and it's the perfect easy thing to make hours after firing and the oven it still a lovely 300-350 degrees inside. I always get to that point when I'm very tired but I hate to "waste" all that heat, so now I mix up granola-makings the night before and all I have to do is toss in some honey/oil and it's ready to go.
How many times have you baked with yours so far?