Transition Culture

The Kinsale Earth Pizza Oven (2004)

Fired With Enthusiasm - the Kinsale Pizza Oven (originally published in Permaculture Magazine Issue No. 39 - the oven is still working and still making fantastic pizza, in fact the college has two pizza ovens now!)

It seems to be all the rage these days for people to write in to PM with their earth oven stories, so, not wishing to be left out, I thought I’d tell the tale of the cob oven we built at Kinsale Further Education Centre (KFEC) as part of the full-time Practical Sustainability/Permaculture course. The idea to build the stove came about, as I imagine most similar projects have, after I had come across a copy of Kiko Denzer’s ‘Build Your Own Earth Oven’. Despite being the course teacher and therefore supposedly knowing how to do these things, I had never actually built an earth oven before, but in the true permaculture spirit of having a go, and believing that the best way to learn something is to teach it, I decided to give it a go.

We had just finished work on the strawbale house in the grounds of the college of KFEC, for which we had utilised some fantastic sandy cay from a building site nearby. One truck load had provided all the plaster for the internal walls of the house and for the undercoat outside. We also had some sand left over from the external lime rendering, and some stone left from some drystone walling we had done. All the ingredients for a cob stove were in place!

To begin with we built a base. This was a circular drystone wall, about 3ft high and 4 feet wide. It was just built drystone, with rubble infill in the middle. On top of this was put a bed of sand onto which we gently placed fire bricks, so that they sat tightly together . Then we built a mound of wet sand in the shape of the inside of the finished stove. This was packed tightly with a board and covered with wet newspaper.

The first mix of cob was just our clay subsoil, with any sizeable stones picked out, mixed on a tarpaulin to a consistency of crunchy peanut butter. This was then built up around the sand in a 3� layer, until the sand form was covered. This was then packed with a board and scored to allow the next layer to attach itself. The second layer was the same mix but with straw in.. This was put on about 4� thick.

Once the shell was complete, we cut the door out and removed the sand (Kiko’s book gives detailed information on how the height of the door relates to the height of the inside of the stove…). The outside was then smoothed and sculpted, and the whole thing was left to dry.

Over the next couple of weeks we lit little fires in it and speed the drying, and then after about 3 weeks came our first bake! With great excitement we lit the fire, let it burn for a couple of hours, scraped out the fire, and eagerly placed our lovingly made first pizza inside. It did nothing. We were deeply disappointed. It brought to mind a letter I had seen in the Permaculture Activist magazine from someone saying “has anyone out there made an earth oven that actually works?� Had we built it wrong? Had we not made a hot enough fire? Was Kiko Denzer just a chancer? Had we completely wasted out time? Had I rather embarrassed myself as the teacher of this course?

The husband of one of my students dropped in one day to see it, and he had worked in a bakery in the UK which used wood-fired ovens. His advice was that the stove simply wasn’t dry enough yet – it needed to be completely dry before it could work properly. Over the next couple of weeks we lit small fires in it again every few days.

A few weeks later we felt it was probably safe to try again. Again we lit a fire and fed it for 2 hours until we had a deep bed of embers. One of my favourite things about these stoves is the way the flames dance up the walls of the interior of the stove when it is really hot, very hard to describe but enchanting to watch.

Once it was hot enough, we removed the fire and popped in the pizzas. This time, when we opened the door after 4-5 minutes, out came a perfectly cooked pizza, beautifully risen, light, fluffy yet crusty, one of the most delicious I have ever tasted (and I’ve eaten a fair bit of pizza in my time). There is something about how bread bakes when sat directly onto wood-fired bricks that gives it an exquisite taste. All the students were delighted, I was very relieved, it worked!

Since then we have baked foccacia, rolls, biscuits and muffins (no soufflé yet…). They all emerge from the oven with a quality you never get from a gas or electric cooker. The bread rolls were like clouds plucked from the sky, light, moist and fluffy, melting in your mouth.

In May we had an Open Day, where the various courses offered at the college promoted themselves, and the public could come and see what we get up to. We made pizza, and visitors were queuing up for a slice. One of the simplest, easiest and most delicious things you can make in a clay oven is foccacia, just bread dough with olive oil, salt and fresh rosemary on top.

Our bread oven is very popular, developing a life of its own. Some of the permaculture students now plan to open the strawbale house as a café, serving breads and pizzas from the oven, together with salads grown in the polytunnel by the organic gardening students. A clay bread oven is a brilliant project to do with a group of people; it reconnects people with the elements. You take the earth from under your feet, sculpt it with your feet and hands into a magical womb-like space, add another element, fire, and your oven then gives birth to humanity’s most staple food, bread. The taste of bread fired in such an oven is magical. If making our stove has achieved nothing else, it has allowed students at the college living in a world of sliced bread to taste what bread tasted like to our ancestors, and how it should taste today, as well as seeing how vital good bread is to a sustainable culture.