36" in Seattle

[kebwi]

Re: 36" in Seattle

Wow, that's an old post. I'm pretty far past that crazy lintel. My slab never settled, not even an 1/8" of an inch, over the course of the entire build. I know it didn't because immediately after pouring the original hearth, I put some dry-stacked concrete blocks under the center as a support pillar. The last blocks slid in with maybe 1/16" clearance, just barely shakable at the right angle. Well, four months and 2000 pounds of firebricks later, those blocks are still loose, so the hearth never settled down onto the free-standing pillar.

Just sayin'...

[M.J.FULLER]

Re: 36" in Seattle

I cast my own lintel- would do the same again. see Lintel 3 - Build Your Own Wood Oven

I found i could make a right angle bend in 1 inch cold rebar using an engineers vice. I was very surprised how easy it was to bend.

Michael

You don't need the angle iron. Throw a couple of extra 3/8 rebar over the lintel areas. This rebar should be bent down 18 inches or so and concreted into the wall. Also put an extra 3/8 inch rebar in an "L" shape around the "weak" corner. I would make the suspended slab at least 4 inches thick with all rebar near the middle vertically.

Rebar is cheap.

[kebwi]

Re: 36" in Seattle

Thanks all. Lots of advice to take in. I'm not too worried about the oven "cooking" the dirt. I have fired it enough times to learn how it behaves and while the top of the exposed InsWool would warm up some, the top of the filled in vermicrete basically doesn't heat up at all. I think the plants will be fine.

As for oven of the month or whatever...sheesh, I haven't finished it and I'm still scared as hell of all the work I have left to do...but thanks for the compliments. We'll have to see how it all works out.

...and lots left to learn on how to book and bake too, I'm just getting started, although the bakeries around Seattle are very inspiring. There's some very good food here.

Cheers!

[eprante]

Re: 36" in Seattle

Keith,
I am intrigued by your terraces, very innovative design. It seems that if your insulation is stout enough then you can plant native plants that will weather the NW climate, if you have some heat leakage then some less hardy plants will survive. A win-win situation( though you may have to fire your oven to keep the plants alive in the second scenario).
Very thoughtful, unique design. If James were doing build of the month I would nominate you. Nice job. Now you just need to learn to cook, since you have an artisan oven. Send off to Sourdough.com for some starter and begin to figure out bread. It is a whole new challenge. And you are always welcome when you bring fresh baked bread to friends house.

Great job!!
Eric

[vintagemx0]

Re: 36" in Seattle

Kebwi,

I just had a thought that might not have much merit, but...

I've seen in a couple of your photos what appears to be a very large amount of coals. I usually only have about perhaps 1/3 as much in my oven at any given time. I mention this because I can't help but wonder if the bottom rows of your sphere are difficult to go white because they are being insulated/shielded by the mound of coals. Relatively speaking, coals offer a lot of insulation from a live fire.

Just a thought. I was thinking that if you put in less fuel in at a time, but at a higher frequency of additions, you could possibly keep the coal bed height down. Might be worth a try???

'Can't wait to see those terraces take-on there own!

Cheers,
Ken

[vintagemx0]

Re: 36" in Seattle

I'm gonna give a shout-out for Pacific NW builders. We too have been using our oven over the winter. We're excited for Spring, summer, and fall. Our winters are not a magical winter wonder-land, but more of a dark, dank, cool, gray, wet...

It's been a real pleasure checking-in on your progress Kebwi. I'm really looking forward to see how your interesting finish takes shape.

Cheers!

Ken

[berryst]

Re: 36" in Seattle

I have not weighed in for a while but its nice to see the northwest pizza lovers showing their colors. I still fire the oven every two weeks or more in our rainy climate. I wondered if I'd still see Wiley. Nice to see he has become sort of a fixture on the site. We started our ovens about the same time
Berryst.

[Wiley]

Re: 36" in Seattle

Keith, in response to your wanting a pan to rake the hot coals into, I use a large aluminum dust pan. If I remember it came from Home Depot and wasn't too expensive. As to a place to to put the hot and still burning coals and lumps of wood: I use a standard roll around type BBQ. I just pull off the top grill and dump the hot stuff in. If I'm trying to save the coals for future use as charcoal then I dump them into a wheel barrow filled with water.

Using the grill/BBQ allows me to return the coals to the WFO should I wish to smoke something like a pork shoulder using retained heat following a bread/roll bake.

Hope this helps,
Wiley

[kebwi]

Re: 36" in Seattle

Finally framed and "poured" (via shovel) the third and final terrace. I actually framed it (hardibacker) last weekend, but wanted to cook more steam out of the exposed InsWool before covering it up, so I didn't fill in the vermiperlcrete until this weekend.

65:65:13 quarts of vermiculite/perlite/portland (5:5:1 or 10:1 overall). That's about 4.3 cubic feet of vermiculite and perlite.

I did the two lower terraces 8:1 but went 10:1 on the last terrace for three reasons. One: I was worried that I was running out of portland, two: most of the heat goes straight up so if I am going to use variable insulating values, it may as well be more insulative on top, and three: the higher terraces don't need to withstand as much force as the lower terraces (the concrete can be weaker).

The photos shown that I didn't perfectly level the fill, but rather left a smooth lump in the center. The two lower terraces are the same way, sloping up toward the center of the oven. The intention is to help water flow off the planter beds.

Also shown are the bricks that will comprise the sidewalls of the planter beds. Standard pavers are considerably thicker than I wanted so I'm slicing up these super thin slabs instead. Not sure if my HF DiamondLife blade will last (it's only the second blade of the entire job and I did a lot of cutting), may have to get another. Sigh. HF is kind of far away.

Cheers!

[kebwi]

Re: 36" in Seattle

My first and second attempts at "bread", which I put in quotes b/c the bread in question is premade bread, bought frozen, thawed, then shoved in the oven. I think that first bread might be a tad overdone but the second one is pretty good. I waited longer after pizza to cook the second bread.

Please don't point out that I'm not supposed to have coals in the oven when I bake bread. I'm well aware, but I have no way to get rid of coals yet. I need a metal "pan" of some sort to receive coals as I rake them out of the oven and likewise I need some place to put the coals once they come out. I have neither of those things yet.

On the plus side, the pile of coals isn't necessarily growing. From one pizza fire to another I can cook the coals down to a pile of the same size each time...which means I don't theoretically need to ever clean out the oven, unless a certain food (like bread) requires it.

Cheers!

[Dino_Pizza]

Re: 36" in Seattle

The thing with bread baking and the floor/dome/side temps is that IDEALLY, you've bought the oven to near pizza temps or did pizzas and are through with them. Now you have way too hot an oven for bread, but that's ok since you are going to rake out the ashes (it honestly is only a 1.5 minute process) with your shovel and steel pale then you mop it down (I always use a wet oven mop, even for pizzas to clean off some ash and not burn the bottoms (honestly, I don't care if I do eat a bit of ash but guests can be picky) then put the door back on to let the heat re-organize after cooling it down with the wet mop. At some point, after resting, all 3-4 temp readings are closely equalized at the bread temps you want. Or what you did sounded as successful as anyone gets. It's all fun and you learn as you go.

Also, I'm a big fan of rice flour. White rice takes about an hour to cook 'cuz it really does NOT want to absorb water so it's ideal for sliding dough. I bought a tin salt shaker at the store (the kind mom-pop hamburger joints use to shake salt on their burgers), filled it with rice flour and labeled it, and it sprinkles out just fine. Can't wait to see your bread pics, it's all good!

[kebwi]

Re: 36" in Seattle

Last night was my third pizza attempt (two pizzas per night, so this was #5 and #6). I had much better success this time than the previous attempt as described above. Cleared the dome almost down the sides (the bottom six to eight inches hadn't cleared after 90 minutes and I was tired of waiting). I made my pizzas a little thicker this time so they wouldn't disintegrate. They were consequently smaller which made them easier to manipulate in the oven, but in truth, they were probably too thick, so I'll have to work on my technique...but overall a success!

Still working on my temps. The floor wasn't really 700-800 while cooking, it was more like 500-600.

After that I threw in some cheap freezer bread dough. It cooked to a blackened crisp! I thought it might work because the door thermometer was only registering an interior air temperature of 400, so I'm unsure how to use that thermometer to determine baking temps (there's the IR-floor temp, the IR-dome temp, and the door-probe-air temp, how do I use these to gauge bread baking?). Admittedly, I didn't even clean out the coals, so that is not the proper way to cook bread by a long shot.

Then, I doored up the oven (with a very large pile of red-hot coals), and it was about 300F this morning, so I threw in another freezer doughball and made a nice little breakfast bread which my wife was very pleased about.

I need to post pics of the bread, but I didn't even make the dough, so it doesn't really count in my mind.

Cheers!

[Neil2]

Re: 36" in Seattle

Another trick to get them to slide off the peel onto the oven floor is to ease the uncooked pizza ahead on the wooden peel until there is about inch or so overhanging the edge of the peel. This inch will "catch" on the hot floor and you can slide the peel back out .

[Alter ego]

Re: 36" in Seattle

Hi Keith,

A tale of pizza disaster

Did you throw the resulting mess onto the fire as an offering to the pizza gods?

I had similar results to you when began using my oven. The first time the pies were all OK if a little miss shaped, the second time I lost several on the floor in a mess and I was so disappointed with that I just threw them on the fire.

This offering to the pizza oven gods has seemed to work as now I can slide them in & out without too much problem. The practice certainly helps as I have now made about 40 pizzas and each time it gets better.

The others have all mentioned good ideas but another thing that helped me was that I cut down on my dough ball size (200g) to make smaller pizzas as they are easier to handle.

The good news is that you just have to keep practicing.

Paul

[papavino]

Re: 36" in Seattle

+1 to not letting the pizza sit on your peel for too long. I'm still working on my method, but I usually have one person making a pizza while another one is out by the oven cooking one. It works out pretty well and some of my friends have gotten decent at making pizzas. And it reduces the burden on me when we have people over. Every once in a while, the dough will get a hole in it and some tomato or olive oil will leak underneath and cause the dough to stick to the metal peel. Might be time to get a wooden one.

As for finding rice flour, any grocery with a bulk section should have it. Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, Greenwood Market, Central Market, PFI, etc.