Portable Oven Building Class

Have you ever wanted to make wood-fire pizzas at home or at the cabin in your own outdoor oven?  
 
On May 14th from 9:00 to 4:00 pm, David S. Cargo, one of the founders of the Saint Paul Bread Club and professional baker, will be teaching his popular class on how to build an affordable portable brick oven. This class is the same one mentioned in From the Wood-Fired Oven by Richard Miscovich, published by Chelsea Green.

These portable brick ovens are portable because they can be moved once they have been built. They are built from stacked bricks that are not mortared together. If you need to move the oven, you can just move the bricks and restack them to rebuild the oven at its new location.

You can build a small oven by yourself in about an hour. You can go from bare ground to cooking pizza in about 4 hours. Class discussion covers some of the differences between these portable brick ovens and more familiar designs such as Alan Scott ovens, Forno Bravo Pompeii ovens, and cob ovens such as those made popular by Kiko Denzer.

The class covers siting the oven, preparing the ground for the oven, and then the practical techniques for construction. Every student gets a handout with plans for three different sizes of ovens, their bills of materials, and recipes for use with the oven.

In the class we build an oven. It’s built to demonstrate the techniques and how to read the plans that show how the ovens go together. After it’s built, it’s fired for four hours to get it up to baking temperature (usually 800 degrees or more).

While the fire is heating the oven up, David demonstrates how to make the doughs for pizza and bread, for naan, and for pita bread.

Later in the afternoon, the doughs are formed into the proper shapes for baking, and some dough is formed for a loaf of bread. Finally, the pita bread, naan, and pizzas are baked (and eaten) and then the loaf of bread goes into the oven.

NOTE: The class does not provide students with any building materials. The approximate cost for building the oven like the one demonstrated in the class is about $600 not counting any shipping and taxes.

The fee is $80 and you can register on EventBrite.  Here is the link:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/portable-oven-building-class-tickets-22175623888

Our First Bread Baking Class

It was a great day at the community oven. About twenty of us gathered and learned from Ross Safford about dough strength. We baked sourdough, ciabatta, oatmeal bread and lavash.  By the end, I think we baked about sixty loaves of bread and thoroughly enjoyed spending time with neighbors and making new friends.

Our plan is to evaluate and then schedule additional classes in the near future as well as community bread baking days where people can bring their loaves from home to bake in the oven.

Here are some shots of the day: