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Hi All. I started and finished building this earth cob oven last year. I kept visiting a building site every day to get the clay/mud mix and then would spend 4-5 hours in the evening treading and mixing the sand with it. Article about how to use a local fire clay collected in the nature for building clay pizza ovens. So far we have cooked pizza’s, bread and roast potatoes, Mediterranean vegetables and roast lamb with garlic and rosemary. It’s amazing pizza’s cook in about two minutes when the oven is really hot. Gauging the temperature is a process of trial and error. I now wait until the outside gets warm before starting the (more…)

Hi, let me share something interesting you guys might want to consider when putting up a food establishment. I have been in the food industry for a decade and a half now and I have been so used to cooking with different types of ovens. I won’t claim to be an expert on this though I’m quite sure about the fact that it’s always best to go traditional! (more…)

Keep the beans moving so they don't burn.

For the past 7 years I have been roasting our household coffee in the wood oven , and while I don’t claim to be an expert, I have now roasted over 300 times and you can’t help but learn a few things along the way.

First thing , Why bother ? Well, by buying green beans you will find it a whole lot cheaper than at the gourmet coffee store . I can buy organic, shade tree, fair trade , ethical coffee, in bulk delivered to my door in the Canadian outback for $4 a lb. That very same stuff roasted can cost you from $12 -$16. You can get regular non organic Brazilian for much, much less. (more…)

So now it’s winter.  That doesn’t mean you are going to stop cooking in your WFO does it ?  Of course not …. While cold weather can affect the fire in your oven, it can have an even bigger affect on the oven operator. Get a warm , non flammable coat that you can sacrifice … there will be soot! I draw my line in the snow at -20C , below that I prefer to (more…)

Hello to all, this oven design is FANTASTIC to say the least. Here’s a few shots of the oven, pizza, leg of lamb, YUMMY! I am SO glad I went with this, I fire up at 10:30 Sat. Morning after coffee, get things ready for pizza at noon, prep the bread for after pizza time while the wife gets going on what she wants to roast for dinner. Cooking time well organized. It is so easy, and the cooking time with all the insulation effort has been well worth it. After cooking dinner one Sat., I closed the oven door, Sunday, LATE afternoon, around 6 pm I went to the oven, opened the door to check the temp, it was still at (more…)

To celebrate finishing the chimney and almost all the rendering we fired up the oven.

Picture 1. The finished chimney – And also the render on the whole wall is done and it is drying up nicely.

Picture 2. Blackwood slab for making pizza/bread paddle – At the same time I decided to make a wooden peel for loading the pizzas. We already have a metal one for unloading but I thought a wooden one would be fun to make. (more…)

Simple pizza. It’s now Autumn here and we’ve just enjoyed a happy and successful day of fun with our oven (building progress). Family were coming over for lunch so I started the fire at around 8.15 in the morning. Because of the fairly large amount of mass to heat it does take a while for the soot to disappear from the inside of the oven. Possibly I was not adding enough mass of wood. A note on firewood. I have been using very dry Yellow Box Eucalypt which is very dense and gives very good heat. Belinda had been busy making dough and by midday we (more…)

The base slab as part of a long wall. After ordering the CD’s from Rado I started building with the slab in November 2009 and had the first firings in March 2010. Because this is part of a larger south-facing garden project we decided to build it into one of the walls. It’s been a stimulating and at times challenging project although now we’ve had the first pizzas it has been worth it. Now I’m onto the new learning curve not just of how the oven behaves but also (more…)

Listen and watch video … Eight more days to go before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is fully turned on and scientists start with the new experiment/s. If it doesn’t do anything useful it will become the most expensive technological art on earth costing USD$6.5 billion (~8 billion AUD$s). Nuclear Physicist Walter Wagner talks about his concerns and suggests to delay starting of the huge Hadron Collider at Cern, Switzerland. Earth could well be in danger if anything goes wrong with the LHC and that it shouldn’t be started without further study. Mayan end calendar is also mentioned by people phoning in. You need to hear/watch this. Sometimes the science goes too far and this thing might be the big case this time. (more…)

I opened our pen draw last night intending to pick one for keeping next to the phone. I have realized how many pens there were, a whole pen collection! It was almost hard to pick the pen I wanted. This is what you can easily end up with if you work for an industry whose sales representatives give their company pens away. Pens of gold. Isn’t that great, writing equipment is always useful to have close by because very often I can not find any. Or is it only me?

Hypothetically, how much could one of these pens cost if sold in a local news agency? About 3 bucks per pen in average? Probably. I am going to keep only 5 of them and will take the rest of the collection to school to give to (more…)