A&S: The Clay Oven / Life Update
I'm building a small clay bake oven as a project for Northern Lights. There are a couple different ways to do it; the one I'm going with is going to be portable (for obvious reasons). Gode Cookery has several good primary images of this sort of thing. This is the one with the best detail.
It's a basic clay form, constructed over a wattle framework for support. All the accounts I've read say to expect the wattle to burn out in the first or second firing, but that the clay will hold its form after being fired. I took a lot of construction notes while I was at Plimoth. While theirs are massive stationary ovens, mine is essentially a scaled down version.
The base, the cart, the mortar trough in which I was mixing the clay, and one of the buckets I'd used to collect it.
I dug the clay from a bank in a river a few miles away. We could only get to it by boat, so Ekk held the boat steady while I dug and filled a number of five-gallon pails. Once home, I had knocked together a frame already. I tacked some expanded metal mesh into the base (for support, since I don't think I trust the boards along the bottom edge) and put handfuls of leaves over it to keep the clay in while it dried. Ekk lent me a cart, which is for display purposes only.
Mostly finished base with helping chicken. Note the cat paw-print in the upper right corner - our big black tomcat decided to come say hi. Before I could stop him, he jumped up, and just as quickly levitated down and away.
The set base, this morning. I measured out and traced the dimensions of the oven. The stick is the predicted internal height measurement.
The base is pure clay. I will probably add a little bit of chopped hay for improved stability with the walls. A period technique is to use manure, which I've got no problem with, but I suspect if I do that nobody will want to touch it thanks to modern squeamishness. (Seriously, once the oven's been fired to 500+ degrees, I really doubt anybody'd be catching anything even if there was anything to catch. But I imagine with the recent nervousness about the GI plague at Crown, everybody's going to be extra wary.) But all the old, sun-bleached horse manure around the yard is *just* the perfect consistency for chopped hay for this use... Heh.
The oven framework, right at the point I realized I'd set my outside edge too close to the boards and consequently would not be able to get enough clay on there. So I'm going to have to pull down the framework and re-do it tomorrow. Yes, the arches are uneven, but getting the side walls woven in will straighten them out.
Side view of the same.
I've been researching authentic bread recipes to use once this is finished. I decided on the lost-wax technique for the bread stamps, and began carving my wax forms the other night. Progress!
And all this is between my usual lists of farm chores - Ekk's trapping for mink & muskrat right now, so I'm taking over pretty much all of the animal care. I rebuilt part of the henhouse the other day and have been hunting for the chickens' second secret hidden egg laying spot.
Yesterday, I dug out and re-rocked our winter spring. I figure that between all the back and forth, I probably moved something like 800 lbs of rocks. (My original figure was 500, but then Ekk pointed out to me that the largest of the stones I'd been arranging probably weighed over a hundred pounds itself. I forget how strong I can be sometimes.)
Unfortunately, one of the grants I'd been hoping for this winter got turned down, so my predicted winter income is a bit lower than I'd expected. Ekk & I are on the job hunt right now. We're fortunate in that while we've had no income since I left Star on Oct 4, our expenses are so low that we're able to live comfortably off the surplus we accumulated while I was working. (Our electric bill this month was eight dollars!) So getting a job is a good idea, not an Oh-my-God-crisis.
Our quality of life has improved dramatically since moving out to the hay shed. We're moving less firewood, staying warmer, and cooking more easily. I'm very pleased that I've finally been able to get Ekk to gain some weight! ;) He's terribly skinny - damn high metabolism. He's been skinny enough that the nurse practitioner he sees has been worried about him. Thankfully, I like to cook, and I'm starting to see that results on him. (And yes, ekkehardt, I know you're going to read this.) I'm also glad that I seem to be doing pretty good at keeping off all the weight I've lost over the last year or so. I've put on a few pounds as part of my pre-winter metabolism jump, but I'm not worried. It'll clear out by spring.
It's a basic clay form, constructed over a wattle framework for support. All the accounts I've read say to expect the wattle to burn out in the first or second firing, but that the clay will hold its form after being fired. I took a lot of construction notes while I was at Plimoth. While theirs are massive stationary ovens, mine is essentially a scaled down version.
The base, the cart, the mortar trough in which I was mixing the clay, and one of the buckets I'd used to collect it.
I dug the clay from a bank in a river a few miles away. We could only get to it by boat, so Ekk held the boat steady while I dug and filled a number of five-gallon pails. Once home, I had knocked together a frame already. I tacked some expanded metal mesh into the base (for support, since I don't think I trust the boards along the bottom edge) and put handfuls of leaves over it to keep the clay in while it dried. Ekk lent me a cart, which is for display purposes only.
Mostly finished base with helping chicken. Note the cat paw-print in the upper right corner - our big black tomcat decided to come say hi. Before I could stop him, he jumped up, and just as quickly levitated down and away.
The set base, this morning. I measured out and traced the dimensions of the oven. The stick is the predicted internal height measurement.
The base is pure clay. I will probably add a little bit of chopped hay for improved stability with the walls. A period technique is to use manure, which I've got no problem with, but I suspect if I do that nobody will want to touch it thanks to modern squeamishness. (Seriously, once the oven's been fired to 500+ degrees, I really doubt anybody'd be catching anything even if there was anything to catch. But I imagine with the recent nervousness about the GI plague at Crown, everybody's going to be extra wary.) But all the old, sun-bleached horse manure around the yard is *just* the perfect consistency for chopped hay for this use... Heh.
The oven framework, right at the point I realized I'd set my outside edge too close to the boards and consequently would not be able to get enough clay on there. So I'm going to have to pull down the framework and re-do it tomorrow. Yes, the arches are uneven, but getting the side walls woven in will straighten them out.
Side view of the same.
I've been researching authentic bread recipes to use once this is finished. I decided on the lost-wax technique for the bread stamps, and began carving my wax forms the other night. Progress!
And all this is between my usual lists of farm chores - Ekk's trapping for mink & muskrat right now, so I'm taking over pretty much all of the animal care. I rebuilt part of the henhouse the other day and have been hunting for the chickens' second secret hidden egg laying spot.
Yesterday, I dug out and re-rocked our winter spring. I figure that between all the back and forth, I probably moved something like 800 lbs of rocks. (My original figure was 500, but then Ekk pointed out to me that the largest of the stones I'd been arranging probably weighed over a hundred pounds itself. I forget how strong I can be sometimes.)
Unfortunately, one of the grants I'd been hoping for this winter got turned down, so my predicted winter income is a bit lower than I'd expected. Ekk & I are on the job hunt right now. We're fortunate in that while we've had no income since I left Star on Oct 4, our expenses are so low that we're able to live comfortably off the surplus we accumulated while I was working. (Our electric bill this month was eight dollars!) So getting a job is a good idea, not an Oh-my-God-crisis.
Our quality of life has improved dramatically since moving out to the hay shed. We're moving less firewood, staying warmer, and cooking more easily. I'm very pleased that I've finally been able to get Ekk to gain some weight! ;) He's terribly skinny - damn high metabolism. He's been skinny enough that the nurse practitioner he sees has been worried about him. Thankfully, I like to cook, and I'm starting to see that results on him. (And yes, ekkehardt, I know you're going to read this.) I'm also glad that I seem to be doing pretty good at keeping off all the weight I've lost over the last year or so. I've put on a few pounds as part of my pre-winter metabolism jump, but I'm not worried. It'll clear out by spring.