Articles, tips and stories » baking http://www.traditionaloven.com/articles Blog related to articles, subjects, ideas and tips for improving life or coping with boredom in general sense. Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:35:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 My oven cooks FANTASTIC !! http://www.traditionaloven.com/articles/189/my-mto-wood-fired-oven-cooks-fantastic http://www.traditionaloven.com/articles/189/my-mto-wood-fired-oven-cooks-fantastic#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2009 04:26:13 +0000 Contributor http://www.traditionaloven.com/articles/?p=189 My Masterly Tail oven design cooks fantastically.

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 250 degrees Fahrenheit = 121.1 degrees Celsius, that was 31 hours after firing, a good size arm load of wood!!! If you let it cool a bit, you could dehydrate fruits and veggies real nicely!!!

Leg of lamb roasted in Masterly Tail brick oven design. Greg cooked great pizza in his Masterly Tail brick oven. Pizzas done by Greg in his MTo design wood fired oven. Bread baked in Greg's Masterly Tail oven design - picture. Greg built professional Masterly Tail oven firebrick chamber.

Rado,
I’ve thanked you several times for your help and quick response when I was a bit puzzled on which way to go. And thanks for the opportunity to share such a AWESOME design with me and who ever else was smart enough to order your CD. It’s a great guide to perfection. How you were able to respond to me so quickly was beyond me, it was like you were sitting at your computer waitng.

Ground slab making for building MTo wood burning ovens. Greg's concrete block walls in Masterly Tail oven building. MTo firebrick arch wooden template making. Making MTo oven firebrick vault arch. Making firebrick rear dome wall in MTo wood burning oven. Greg fired for the first time his wood fired pizza oven.

Folks,
I went with the Masterly Tail (fire chamber size and firebricks structure) but as you can see I used what was given to me for the Facade. I also found several deals at the brick yards clearance section which most brick yards DO have. If anyone needs help of any kind I would be glad to assist. I would like to build another one just for fun.

As you can see, cooking in this oven is a GREAT time!! We just finished pizza for lunch, and after letting the oven cool for an hour or so, I put two loaves of bread made with half Spelt flour and half Bread flour. They will cook for about 40 minutes and then I will load three LARGE chicken breast’s that we will eat for dinner, OH, the wife just asked me to put in a few cookies ( on the pizza stone) for Grandma to have with her coffee. HA! What a BLAST!!! If any one is thinking of building one of these ovens, think no more, get busy, have RADO send you a cd, You won’t be sorry!!! FOLLOW HIS PLAN!!! You will LOVE IT!!!

I’m located in North Fort Myers, Florida.

Rado, your design is by far the best I’ve seen, I researched this for several months before ordering your cd. Now I can’t say I made it as perfect as yours ( because you are the man!!) but it works fine, it takes one and a half hours to get to pizza temp. Easy to do. With seasoned oak firewood or gum branches, etc. I’m SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO happy!!!

Thanks once again.

Greg

]]> http://www.traditionaloven.com/articles/189/my-mto-wood-fired-oven-cooks-fantastic/feed 3 The cooking begins http://www.traditionaloven.com/articles/162/the-cooking-begins http://www.traditionaloven.com/articles/162/the-cooking-begins#comments Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:34:56 +0000 keith http://www.traditionaloven.com/articles/?p=162 Simple pizza appetizer: tomato, mozzarella, anchovies and home cured olives. 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 were ready to make some pizza. This is one of the first times we’ve cooked in the oven and it was even more delicious than it looked. The temp according to the cheap thermometer was around the 600C mark and the pizza was done in a couple of minutes. Pizza oven with rendered walls. The one illustrated here was tomato, mozzarella, anchovies and home cured olives. The dough puffed up nicely with a good crunch on the cornice.

In the courtyard, rendered oven with the wall. We made three pizzas as appetizers. This is the still unfinished courtyard. We’ll be finishing the render then paving and planting. I’m going to extend the chimney as you can see. That’s Sam on the left, my rendering son. Others are Anton and my daughter Allie relaxing on the sitting wall.

Improvised brush for pizza oven. Here’s Belinda checking progress. How do you like my improvised brush? Still need to get a proper one but this did the job (sort of).

Raking tool handle for pizza oven. Here’s a close up of the beautiful handle of the raking tool made for me by my neighbour Paul.

Culinary art with chicken and cauliflower. Culinary arts with chicken and cauliflower. Next course was a butterfly chicken with a mix of parsley, sage, garlic and olive oil under the skin. In front is cauliflower with paprika, garlic and oil.

Chook meat and culinary art. The chicken cooked in about half an hour and was juicy and tender. I rotated it from time to time and it had alfoil over it for most of the time.

Baked cibatta bread in wood fired oven. Then later on we baked some cibatta after raking out the coals and cleaning the floor of the oven.

Finally for the meal tonight I made a pumpkin risotto in the oven.

Tomorrow morning the oven will still have plenty of heat so I’ll think of something to cook then! Culinary art of preparing a fine pumpkin risotto … Culinary arts with pumpkin risotto.

- Keith

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