760°C

 As I started firing the oven it was difficult to raise he temperature and to keep it constant. It was a very stressful time! At first I thought I built the roof to high, or that the walls were perhaps to thin. Then I visited Ile De Pain bakery in Knysna. They have a large wood-fired oven, and there I got a few ideas.  I started playing with ventilation, choking the fire to allow it to burn slower and longer, thus enabling the bricks to absorb more heat that way. I then started firing the oven.

Over 3 days I slowly raised the temperature to 450°C. I found that a lot of heat was escaping through the roof. I allowed the oven to cool completely and built a third layer of  bricks over the existing roof. I first had to wet the roof to get the cob mixture to bind with the existing dry cob. I left the roof to dry and slowly fired her up again. This time I raised the temperature to 760°C.  It surely was very exciting and the sense of achievement was well worth the effort. The oven kept the temperature very well, 12 hours later the temperature was 400°C, 16 hours later I baked a sample batch of bread at 250°C for 30 minutes.  Well, the oven is fired and definitely hard enough by now - time to bake some bread or invite some friends for a pizza. While the oven was dying, I spent time on deciding on the breads I want to produce, sizes and weight. I have made a French country bread which was rustic in appearance and texture, and with a rich strong flavour.

Drying the oven

It’s a pity the oven wasn’t finished over the festive season, I could have made some slow food for the visiting family. The past week I spent firstly wetting the oven to get all the brick and cob to an even wetness, that took 3 days and secondly  I started drying out the oven with a small gas burner, which took eight days and two 9kg gas tanks.  I then removed the timber arch on the inside, very slowly, it was quite scary considering the roof properly weighed in the region of 2tons and was unfired.

When I was certain the oven was dried out well, I started with a small fire made out of large logs which smoldered the whole night thru. Next I will start increasing the size of the fire until it is well hardened, my previous oven I went as high as 600 degrees Celsius. I will post sone fotos later this evenig.

Some chickens

I finished the chimney and started plastering and finishing off the oven, by this time my back and hands were aching, all the lifting of the bricks, finishing off by hand, was starting to take it’s  toll. 

 As you can see in the first picture, I have been keeping the oven wet and under shade cloth to avoid it drying out.

 

I want to serve home made ice cream in the restaurant, so this weekend I started buying chickens for their eggs , which is a main ingredient in ice-cream, the other being cream, considering my neighbor is a dairy farmer I will contact him for milk and cream. I have made goats cheese in the past and is considering it again, I will have to think about this one.

Building the roof

The most stressful part of building the oven was the roof, considering it would consist of around 1500 kg of brick and clay. First I cut an arch out of 3 boards, placed them level in the oven and then loosely packed timber planks over them to form the arch. The timber wasn’t nailed down, because it had to be removed once the roof was finished and the clay had set. I used a cement lintel in the chimney, although a clay arch would have been more attractive, but it would have made the oven smaller, a practical decision. Again I kept the bricks wet and started building the roof. I made sure the bricks were as close to each other as possible and I filled up all gapes between the bricks with clay.

Once the roof was done I finished it off  with clay, tomorrow I will do the chimney. I kept the oven wet by spaying it with water, the idea is to get the oven uniformly wet so that when I start drying the oven it would dry evenly, I could imagine cracking to be a clay ovens biggest problem.

1,000 clay bricks

While I waited for my cement to harden, I bought normal clay bricks from Langkloof brick yard. I worked on roughly 1,000 brickes for the oven, including the base. I also started collecting clay from a farm in the area, building sand and cutting grass. The clay had to be worked with the feet to achieve the perfect consistency! I then mixed the sand and grass to the clay and stomped this mixture thoroughly.

In my first oven, I mixed one part clay with one part sand and half a part grass. Considering that the oven worked very well and I had experienced no cracking, I was not going to deviate from that recipe.

It was hard work to mix everything together and be certain it was mixed well - this is a crucial step! I added water until the clay had the consistency of building sement.

When I was certain the cement was hard (after about two weeks of keeping the cement base wet!) I lay the first layer of clay bricks on top af the clay mix or mortar. I decided on a small narrow chimney to maximize the size of the inside of the oven. I designed the oven so that the chimney would be choked when the door is closed, thus creating a sealed oven for baking. The fire would be burnt out and the oven cleaned before bread is put into the oven. When making pizza or baked vegetables, for example, the door would be kept open with a fire right in the back of the oven.

After the first layer, a base layer of clay brick was added on top of the cement base. Now, it was just a question of building the wall to the desired height. Each brick was dipped in water before building and was kept wet during the whole process. It took a full day to build the walls up to 650mm (including the base layer).

You reap what you sow

I was paging through book on Taoism this weekend, and in the preface it was mentioned that the writer based his philosophy on the idea that "you will reap what you sow".

I like this philosophy when it comes to building baking ovens. Take your time, build strong and build straight, and you will reap the benefits tenfold in the form of delectable oven-baked delights. Considering that I am not a qualified builder, I enlisted the help of George the builder to lay the cement base for the oven - the foundation was 250mm wide and 200mm deep! George built a strong cement base to support the oven, and I had to make sure he never strayed - otherwise there would be greater problems at a later stage in the process. The size of the base was 1800mm wide, 2m long and 800mm high.




Next, when the base was well dried, we poured a slab of cement on top of it. We used gum poles to build a box to hold this cement in place, which would later be removed.




When the plans for my oven started taking shape, a family of Lesser Striped Swallows started building a nest on my patio. Their nest is made up of a bowl with a long tubular entrance, and it consists of mud pellets - so there were two building projects on the farm using earth! The female started brooding a few days before I started my building.

After all the hard work, who will reap the benefets first? Will it be the swallows, or will it be Charl? The race is on!

Rye bread

I had a dear Estonian friend named Toomas Lapp, and except for his regular visits to me and Helena, he was also a regular in my restaurant. Toomas knew that I loved a good rye bread, but complained bitterly about the quality of South African rye flour, it was incredibly bland and too light in colour. Bearing this in mind, Toomas promptly brought me some Estonian rye flour, about four different loaves of Estonian rye bread and an exquisite book on Estonian rye breads (which was unfortunately too authentic - it was all written in Estonian!).

From this point forward, I developed a passion for a dark, rich, and luxurious rye bread. Toomas passed away in June this year, I was heart-broken. With his kind and gentle soul he was to me what a demi god would be. My passion for a good rye bread is still with me and I will make a wonderful sour dough rye bread in the near future!

The name of the Estonian bread book is Koduleivaraamat and the author is Kaia-Kaire Hunt: I wonder if I could persuade her to come and teach us South Africans how a real rye bread is made...