How to build a Wood Fired Oven

Backyard Oven

Beginnings…

So I had been baking bread for a number of years and collecting many recipe books on the craft of artisan bread.  Many of these authors discussed the different options for baking bread.  The topic of wood fired ovens kept popping up.  I was intrigued.  I had never thought about baking bread outdoors.  I guess it could be done in a dutch oven over a fire or with charcoal, but what was this oven that they kept talking about.

That stayed in the back of my mind for a while until one day at work (I worked in a book store at the time) I read an article in Mother Earth News that discussed how simple it is to build your own oven.  I thought that there is no way that it could be so easy.  After more research and finding that a “typical” masonry oven could easily cost tens of thousands of dollars, there was no way I could afford to build something like that (remember – bookstore).

If you follow the link above, you will see some great pictures and get some great instruction on building a very simple “mud oven”.  This may sound odd, trust me, I thought it was really weird at first.  I kept reading, then discovered that the author of that article, Kiko Denzer, had also written a book on the topic.  Build Your Own Earth Oven, has a wealth of information on how achievable it is for anyone to have their own oven.