Ian Miller with his baby daughter in front of his oven

Out of the blue one day I got a phone call from a guy named Ian Miller. He said he had built a few ovens, baked a fair amount of bread, was married to an Austrian and (among other things) interested in translating Build Your Own Earth Oven into German. With that began an adventure that is now resulting in a new (German!) edition of the book, published by Stocker Verlag, out of Austria (they also publish Austrian permaculturist Sepp Holzer, which makes it even more of an honor). Very interesting to let go of the book and let someone else take it all apart and put it all back together again in a language I can’t read or speak. But in the process of doing it, I realize there are some good stories I haven’t yet shared — not about translation and books, but about ovens and their people. So, while it’s late (especially in terms of giving credit where it’s due for previous projects) I hope this will be a start.

Starting with the most recent (and hoping for a chance to profile each person in greater detail), folks and their stories include:

Ian (above, with his baby daughter Iantha, in front of an oven he built in Iowa, where he was living at the time), who not only translated the book, but got the whole project going.

Rainer Warzecha, an artist and builder in Germany who has helped with the translating, and also contributed photos and stories of his wonderful work in Berlin’s Britzer Garden for Dig Your Hands in the Dirt. His website is www.interglotz.de – worth looking at!

Hendrik Lepel, a German born builder and jack of many trades who’s building ovens and teaching mostly out of ireland, and who read the German text. His website is bakehus.com

Holger Laerad, a Canadian of German heritage, who builds many beautiful things of mud and wood, including ovens, heaters, and more. I don’t think he has a website, but if he does, I’ll get it added on…

And Elke Cole, a German architect and mud-builder living in Canada, whom I’ve known for years now, and who one year sent me amazing photos of amazing mud work in Germany (at Britzer Gardens, which is how I began a correspondence w/Rainer, who not only contributed to but also helped tremendously to improve the layout and design of Dig Your Hands in the Dirt.) Elke spends a lot of time traveling, working and helping in Africa, but also took quite a bit of time, from the sounds of it to help Ian with the translation. More about her and her work at elkecole.com

Thank you thank you thank you all!

more later…

It started as a dream idea of our Executive Director, Pat Morrissy: “Let’s build a community outdoor, wood fired oven where people can bring bread and pizza dough to bake together outside!” The idea caught on and the Earth Oven was begun. A local student of landscape architecture drew a plan, the proprietor of a brick oven pizzeria consulted on the design and a local expert on building with mud scouted the best place to dig for clay soil. The Earth Oven was built by community volunteers of all ages who have taken part in the cement mixing and pouring, constructing the base, mixing the mud with their bare feet, creating the structure with sand and building the dome.

For more of their marvelous story, go to

• http://www.leadersforcommunities.org/profiles/blogs/hands-that-bake-and-break-bread-together?xg_source=activity
• http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/12/communal_earth_oven_in_orange.html

• https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1994229349939.2086799.1669614016&type=1

  https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2132343522707.2090253.1669614016&t

2011 has been a year of yurts, w/two opportunities to try out this simple design of sticks and mud — a more permanent adaptation of the traditional, portable, Mongolian design. One was for a friend and neighbor. The other was a workshop at Aprovecho Institute, as part of their sustainable shelter building series. Lots of people helped! Both were made with locally harvested bamboo and fir poles (arranged reciprocally to make a self-supporting, conical roof w/a central skylight, which I’m still trying to figure out how to cover cheaply…) Here’s a little picture book about the whole process.

How you prep and lay a fire makes a big difference to how things work — or not — in your oven (and other stoves). It’s really pretty simple: dry fuel, small sticks (plenty of surface area), plenty of space for fuel and oxygen to mix — and put your kindling on top, so the fire burns down, clean and hot, like a candle. The video here is a (pretty poor) attempt at sharing some pix of how I do it. It’s too long and wordy — a rough draft. I’ll try and get the next edition done soon! Meanwhile, I’ve been considering what Ianto Evans relates from reading Lewis Mumford: what’s the one characteristic that distinguishes humans from all the other species? No, it’s not our brain, or our music, or any of our wonderful “achievements.” What do we do that none of the other animals do? We use fire. All the others keep their fires inside. Only humans rely on external fire for our survival…

The baker is Noah Elbers, who runs a small bakery in New Hampshire. There are some nice photos of him and his oven(s) on the web, but he’s clearly spending his time in the bakery rather than on the computer — hurrah! He does participate in the brickoven group on yahoogroups, which is where this comment came from.

It is worth noting that Noah fired his 4-5 inch thick cob oven for 5-6 hours every day and used it to run a business. For home-bakers who only use their ovens weekly or less, I’m now recommending just 3″ of thermal mass, and as much insulation as you can manage.

Noah’s comments copied here w/his permission…
– Kiko Denzer

Re: Thermal Mass
Posted by: “noah elbers” breadwks AT sover.net
Thu Jun 26, 2008 4:40 pm (PDT)

When I was just starting out commercially I baked in a minimally insulated, 4-5″ thick cob/clay oven. Here was my schedule and quantities just to give you an idea. This was a 5 foot deep oven, 3 ‘ wide app. but scaling up or down does not affect the number of loads much at all.

I would fire the oven from cold at 4:30 am. With three stokings (a brisk fire most of the time) the oven was fully saturated by 10:30 am.

Production:
2 loads of pizza (6 each load)
3 loads of bread (30-36 loaves each load)
2 loads of cookies or bars (totaling 150 pieces) sometimes pies, but not always, up to 15 on a regular basis, but over 100 at thanksgiving and christmas.
25 lbs of granola
overnight beans
By the end of the next day the oven had cooled enough to dry fruit like apples and plums, or herbs and tomatoes from the garden. Three days after sweep out the oven would be back to air temp.

Light up was very easy in this oven even from cool temps since it heated so fast, wood quantity was miniscule compared to my later AS design, and baking quality when I was within it’s production capacity was better I feel.

When I built the AS oven, a 4X6, I routinely baked upwards of 700 lbs of dough on a single firing, (500 loaves) and a few times over 1000 lbs of food (bread plus wedding catering). Those things when properly heated can really hold on to some heat, but until they are nice and soaked with heat (something I didn’t fully appreciate until after two years of baking in it) I don’t think they bake very well.

When I retired my AS it took well over a month for it to come back to room temp. Amazing, but not useful for home bakers. The other downside of the AS design for home use I think is that once the thing is fully heated, you either need to wait a long time before it enters the lower temp zones better for more delicate things, or you need to have huge amounts of food to bake. The low mass oven will drop lazily but steadily once it is up to full heat, and in a matter of hours you can go from great pizza to great lemon meringue pie. Half an hour at pizza temp, 2 hours in the bread zone, 5 hours for cookies and desserts, 12 hours for braising and roasting, 24 hours for drying etc.

I have no agenda here, just ten years of small scale commercial baking experience that spans three ovens now. I was basically a home baker when I started, the business grew and required greater baking capacity, and I now no longer bake in a black oven. I think retained heat baking is fascinating, rewarding, and generally as good as any other cooking method. My motive in going on and on about this is to help people who have not baked with retained heat understand some of the heat dynamics of different thermal materials. Saving on costs, fuel, air pollution are tangential for me. The experience of using the oven is what I care about most, and I share this from my experience with the two types of ovens. (now three, but the Llopis is a whole different animal)

Noah Elbers
Orchard Hill Breadworks
breadwks AT sover.net
East Alstead NH 03602
(603) 835 7845

Experiential workshop and exploration of technique and theory with Ann Sayre Wiseman

September 10-11, 2011

Oakland, California

Experiential Art and Dream Workshop

Saturday, September 10, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

A self-empowering exploration, in which participants will have a chance to re-create a dream or problem on a “paper stage” using materials to symbolize the story, find the metaphor, test options, and rehearse a workable resolution. Group work enriches and stimulates creativity. A useful method for traumas, depression, stuckness and problem solving.

Exploration of Technique and Theory

Sunday, September 11, 9 a.m. to 12 noon

For dreamworkers, therapists, teachers, parents, ministers, and students. Meet with Ann to discuss the art of guiding others in using the paper stage, the language of color, the benefits of rehearsal, and how this technique can be incorporated in your work.

Ann Sayre Wiseman, MA, (Ansayre) is an artist, psychotherapist, author of 15 books (including Creative Dreaming and Nightmare Help) and former faculty in the Lesley College Expressive Therapies Training program. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. See: www.annsayrewiseman.com and youtube <The Ansayre>

To register, contact Laura Prickett, Prickett_L@yahoo.com, 510.848.8749. Fees on a sliding scale. Full workshop: $150-200 – Day 1 only: $80-120 – Day 2 only: $70-100

You wil need: 8 strips of wooden lath (or cut a wooden yardstick) – small nails – hammer – window screening – staple gun – dry vegetable fibers (such as corn husks, onion skins, celery strings, sawdust, weeds, or straw) – scissors -blender – paper towels, napkins, paper bags, newspaper or tissue – dishpan – newspaper – sponge – iron.

1. Make 2 wooden frames the same size (any size that fits in a dishpan). Staple a piece of window screen onto one frame. This is your mold; the other frame is your deckle.
2. Cut dry vegetable fibers into bits.
3. Put them in a blender, then add a torn-up paper towel or other torn-up paper as filler. Fill blender with water, and blend until smooth. This is a called a slurry.
4. Partially fill dishpan with water, and pour in slurry. Position the mold screen side up, and place the deckle on top of it.
5. Holding the mold and deckle tightly together, dip them into the slurry.
6. Holding them level, raise mold and deckle horizontally. Allow water to drain, leaving mash undisturbed on screen. This is called a wet leaf.
7. Set mold and deckle down on a sheet of newspaper, and remove deckle.
8. Place a newspaper sheet on top of the wet leaf, to act as a blotter.
9. Turn mold and newspaper blotter over, and put them facedown on table.
10. Sponge away excess water through screen.
11. Carefully lift mold up off the wet leaf.
12. Put another newspaper blotter on wet leaf, and iron it dry. Remove blotters.

See how many kinds of paper you can make.

• Don’t use hard, tough fibers such as bark or wood chips unless you have time to first hammer, pound, and boil them into a soft pulp.
• For textured papers, blend reedy grasses into a slurry of paper towel, add pencil shavings or mashed egg carton into the blender, or press milkweed silk into a wet leaf made from brown paper bag or paper towel.  Try laminating yarn scraps, ferns, or pressed lilac blossoms into a wet leaf.  Emboss your paper by pressing a bent wire design into a wet leaf.  Scraps of colored tissue or construction paper will add color to the slurry.
• If the slurry gets scrumpled on the screen, wash it off and dip again.  Don’t rearrange the slurry or wet leaf with your fingers because it will disturb the evenness of the sheet.
• Each sheet of paper gets progressively thinner as you dip.  From time to time you will need to add more slurry to the bath.
• Don’t pour slurry down the sink drain, unless you sieve it first.  It is best to flush it down the toilet or pour it outside on the ground.
• Sizing is optional, but it makes paper less absorbent and easier to write on.  Heat 1 1/2 ounces of bone glue, hide glue, or gelatin and 1 pint of water until glue or gelatin is dissolved and smooth.  Pour glue mixture into a pan or tub big enough to fit your paper.  Add another pint of cold water to the mixture, and slide each sheet of dry handmade paper in and out of the sizing bath.  Blot the paper with newspaper, and press it dry with an iron.
• Newspaper blotters sometimes leave print on your fresh paper sheets.  If it is a problem, use paper towel blotters.  Or if you are making many sheets or setting up a children’s  paper factory – as we did at the Boston Children’s Museum, where sometimes 300 kids each made a sheet of paper per day – invest in several yards of white felt cut to the size of your frames, and use the felt pieces as blotters, squeezing them out between uses.
• A kids’ paper-making factory is a great idea for Christmas or summer fairs.  At the end of the paper-making table, set up a table with potato prints, letter stamps, Styrofoam shapes, and ink pads for printing greeting cards.  Or set up a bookmaking table, and use textured handmade paper as endpapers in your hand-bound books.
• Reading and writing become much more exciting when you create your own books, telling and illustrating your own stories.

Paper is one of the most important and useful materials humans have ever created.  Until a hundred years ago, paper was made by hand and was mostly used for precious documents.

Wasps taught us how to make paper.  (Have you studied a hive?)  Wasps chew fibers and weeds into a kind of paste or mash, then spit it out to form the walls and chambers of their hive; when it dries, it is a kind of paper sculpture.

The first people to make paper were the Chinese, in 105 A.D.  In the sixth century, when the Chinese lost to the Arabs at the Battle of Samarkand, captured paper makers ere forced to share their craft with their new masters.  A thousand years later, the art of paper making reached Europe.

Related Sample Articles from the book The Best of Making Things – A Hand Book of Creative Discovery:

• Paper from Vegetable Fibers

The phenomenon of of learning belongs to the child, not to the teacher.  We do not teach a child to walk – one of many skill potentials in all beginners.  At best, we stimulate discovery, desire, and curiosity; encourage and whet the appetite; provide space; and anticipate readiness to exercise the inevitable.

Learning by experience is profound knowledge, more deeply recorded in the memory than theory or speculation.  The most direct, immediate, and satisfying path to knowledge is visual and manual experience linked with the urgency of interest.
Learning by doing connects products with ideas and history.  It breeds creative thinking, self-expression, and originality, the confidence to experiment, and the courage to make mistakes, learn control, and perfect skills.

This colllection of discoveries and resources is a careful selection of simple and important concepts that have shaped the cultures of the world.  These activities should help to seed and develop natural curiosity and self-esteem.  The projects are explained in pictures so that children just starting out and grown-ups who have missed out can quickly grasp the ideas.

Parents and teachers hold the success of children in their tone of voice and generosity of understanding.  By encouraging self-discovery, by respecting originality and individualism, we avoid the preoccupation with competition, allowing students to progress at their own pace.  Creativity is the birthright of all children.  Let us foster it rather than cramp or nip it in its most eager time for learning.

I made my next oven when I was in South Africa in 1994. Why I was in South Africa is another (much longer) story, but the gist is that I was there designing and building at the Tlholego Development Project, a teacher training center for permaculture and natural building. I had designed a round outdoor sitting area of earthbags, and an earth oven just wanted to be there. The local ladies were already using the center of the sitting area to do open fire cooking with the cool three-legged cast iron pots they have down there. So, I taught some of the local guys how to make an oven based on my previous experience. A few years later I taught I course at Thlolego, and the course coincided with Thanksgiving. You know what comes next – in the effort to spread goodly American culture, we had Thanksgiving with all the trimmings, including… Turkey! We made six of them… a solar turkey, an earth oven one, and a couple in the regular oven in the farmhouse. They all turned out good. The photo shows my daughter Taya in the cooking area when we visited in 2004.

It was not until 1995 that I had the chance to meet another earth oven aficionado, and that was none other than the famous Kiko Denzer. We met at the 1995 Natural Building Colloquium at the Black Range Lodge in Kingston, and I learned from watching him make a beautiful oven with spread-wing bench. I had the chance to cook in that one a few times, when later I moved to the Lodge. I think I helped replaster it too. Another lesson: it is good to make a shelter over your oven.

1n 1996 I was invited to Nova Scotia to teach a series of natural building courses with Bill and Athena Steen at the home of Kim Thompson, a local straw-bale and natural building advocate. My work there was to build the earth oven shelter of gravel bags, straw bales, earth plasters, and a roof of local timber for the “Quebec-style” earth oven built by Bill and Athena. This type of earth oven is unique because of its shape, and was different than others I had made. It had no chimney, was oval shaped, and had a relatively low roof. I real “aha” moment came when I saw that they used a sand form to create the support for the cob. This was dug out later. Brilliant. When I learned later about how well this oven fired, and even more, how it baked, I was sold on this shape. The basic lesson is that if an oven is too big, it does not bake efficiently, and that the interior shape of an oven (and the relationship to the shape/height of the door) is crucial to how well it works.

I first was exposed to a barrel oven when I spent several months at Gaia Ecovillage in Argentina in 1998. This was an intriguing device: a 55 gallon barrel held in place by brick ends with a brick vault built over it. It featured a firing chamber beneath and a small gap of a few inches between barrel and brick vault leading to a chimney on top. L brackets were welded inside to take specially constructed baking pans. I really liked the detail of adding several inches of sand at the bottom of the barrel to hold some thermal mass. We created a nice earthen plaster to cover the oven. We had some really nice food out of this oven, and I was impressed by its efficiency and ease of use. I remembered this design later, when faced with creating an oven for a fuel-starved project in South Africa (more on that later). Editor’s note: find out more about barrel ovens….

In 2002 I was living in Sonoma County on an organic fruit orchard. I held a series of workshops there, and decided on building an outdoor kitchen. I realized that I wanted a real kitchen, with a sink, counters, stove and a place to sit. So, I designed it with all of these. We an oven base and seat base of gravel bags, which we then covered with cob. We built up the backs of the seats with cob. In the workshop was an amateur blacksmith, who offered to make an oven door for us. We cobbed in a sink, and the kettle part of a Weber grill, and made a counter by spanning cob columns with bamboo and cobbing over that. I used the amazing sand form method, and creating a cob layer, as well as an external layer of straw-clay (I thought insulation would be good). I had heard different schools of thought about when you should take out the sand form: 1. Right away and 2. After a long time. Being the impatient sort, I went with #1. Oops. Wrong choice. The inner layer collapsed. Wahhh! But the external straw-clay layer stayed, and luckily was more clay than straw. So… we used it anyway. I ended up plastering the inside, and lived with having a bigger oven. I assume most of the straw has now burnt out, but it ended up working fine. A key thing I started to do with this oven was to eliminate the ash/coal removal process. I did this by loosely piling fired bricks inside the oven. The hot coals and ash would sift down between the bricks, and I would cook in cast iron pans right over the coals. I refuse to mess around with hot coals again. This ended up working really well, as it also raised the cooking vessels into the hotter part of the oven, while providing cooking heat from below and good radiant heat from the cob roof of the oven. While it looked great, and was convenient, I don’t think I will do a metal door again: it lets out too much heat.

A couple of years later, I made another edition of the outdoor kitchen based with students from New College. Used all my lessons: counter height, sand form, insulating outer layer, Quebec-shape, nearby counters and seating and added a new twist: a pot boiler designed at the chimney hole.

I also held a workshop at my home, where we made an entire cob oven in a weekend. Phew!

South Africa called again in 2004, and I went over for a series of workshops and design sessions designing a children’s village in a rural town outside of Pretoria. I was asked to design an outdoor kitchen, and remembered the high efficiency oven I saw in Argentina. I created a design based on my memory, made some sketches, and when a colleague of mine went over, he built the oven as part of an outdoor kitchen and eating complex. From all reports it works great. I also designed a ground rocket stove for use with the cast iron cooking pots, but I never heard how that worked out.

In 2007 and had the opportunity to design and build an outdoor pavilion and kitchen for a client in Healdsburg. I had a chance to do all sorts of cool natural building stuff on this project: super refined cob walls, roman style pebble floors, an outdoor sitting area, and… a cob oven. We decided to add a chimney, since this was a high fire danger area, and we didn’t want to have any sparks. I used all my tricks up to this point, adding an idea of using vermiculite instead of straw to make an insulating layer. And I had learned my lesson, and let this oven dry slooowwwwly. It turned out beautifully, and bakes well, too.

By this point, however, I had become somewhat disenchanted by earth ovens as I had built them, no matter how much I love building and cooking in them. In fact I cringe now whenever I see another wood oven workshop being advertised. The main reason for my change of heart is that most earthen ovens are incredibly wasteful of wood and heat energy. I have so often seen an oven fired for hours just to cook a few pizzas, wasting wood, and sending carbon dioxide and particulate matter into the air. As someone who is trying to save resources, this seemed untenable. Then I heard about this mad scientist down in Los Angeles, Ray Cirino, who was coming up with a super-efficient cob oven concept. I knew I was onboard. After some back and forth on the coblist, I got enough ideas for my next effort, which is currently under construction at a high school in Sonoma County.

For this project I am putting together all my features into my ultimate oven. Counter height? Check. Vermiculite cob insulation? Check. Quebec shape? Check. Pot boiler chimney? Check. But, now, with the addition of a firing chamber beneath the oven, and a metal baking shelf, I hope to create an oven that can be used to cook with right away, is easier to regulate, and is much more efficient with wood use. Stay tuned. I will be sure to send more information as we complete the oven.

So that is my story to date. I hope you have enjoyed it.