Rustic Ovens builds wood-fired brick ovens for home or commercial use. Bake the best bread and pizza you will ever have!
Operating as usual
Rustic Ovens will be serving pizza tonight, August 20th, on Government Street across from the Chase Bank. That just a half block east of the Baton Rouge Magnet School. This is associated with the Mid City Night's Dream. Note the picture of the oven getting fired up and ready to roll.
I have two things to say. First, I have a lot to learn about cooking in a wood fired oven. Second, Help, Eric, were are you?
Now I clearly understand why the directions say to buy some frozen pizza instead of your good pizza to first learn to cook in the oven. My first pizza was a disaster! But, it was very good. I did several things wrong. First, the oven wasn't hot enough. It is tough. You do not want to build too big a fire and I guess I did not. Second, I put the pizza on the peel too soon so the dough got the flour wet and the pizza wouldn't slide off the peel. In spite of that, it tasted great! I am trying a boule later today.
Here is the first fire for cooking. We had an interruption during the night, so we are not having a traditional Easter dinner. Instead, we are having pizza and then I am cooking my first bread in the wood fired brick oven. Hope it goes well. This is my very first effort. After the pizza, I will cook a couple of boule. For those that knew as little as I did a few weeks ago, that is a French ball. I had some dough left over from a few days ago when I made some in the kitchen oven. I shared one of the loaves with Tammy and her fellow workers. Got a good report. I am most anxious to try the wood fired oven. Notice the smoke in the picture. I need a taller chimney.
Between Eric's instructions and my reading, I have learned a great deal about baking bread. I had never tried it until I ate some of the artisan bread that Eric made. After that, I went to his house early one morning to watch and see what I could learn. I have learned a lot. In fact, I have learned enough to know that I do not know much. My French bread comes out pretty well. The family and friends love it. I made one good ciabatta, but another came out bad. Yesterday, I made a boule and it was very good. I made a large batch of dough and put it in the refrigerator. I will put some out for my first bread in the brick oven. You know, it is pretty much fun to be trying something like this at my age. I am having a blast. Thanks, Eric and Jake, and Betti Helen for her patience.
The five log burn is underway. It will take several hours because they are not all burned at once. Three are burned at first and then the coals spread around and the other two are added. So far, the highest temperature has been about 350 degrees at the top of the oven. I am not sure what it was under the coals. Maybe I will find out today when I move the coals around.
We are still in the curing process. Four logs were burned today. We burn five tomorrow and six Wednesday. That will be it. We can begin cooking after that. There will be fresh bread and pizza this weekend.
As Betti Helen says, the oven was built by a teacher, a fireman and a chef. My grandson, Jake is the fireman and my fired Eric is the chef, and, of course, I am the teacher, although I haven't done that in quite a while. We will use this mobile oven to bake bread and make pizzas at places like the Red Stick Farmers' market and other group functions. We are also available to build an oven for you!
An early construction photo shows that we left a hole in slab under what will be the floor of the oven for a mixture of vermiculite and cement. The vermiculite serves as insulation for the floor of the oven. The other photo shows the vermiculite in place and the layer of bricks on edge around it. We used sand to cover the vermiculite and put the firebricks on top of the sand.
Here is one of the early pictures in the building process. As you can see, we poured a concrete slab, laid bricks on edge and then put fire bricks down for the cooking surface. Notice that the bricks are diagonal to the door so that when the pizza peel is used to scoop up a pizza, it will not hit an edge of a brick. Instead, it will slide across easily.
This is the first fire in our new brick oven. There is a very detailed procedure for curing the oven before it can be heated enough to use for cooking. In fact, it takes six days, with one log the first day, two the second, etc. However, we are not going to rest on the seventh day. We are going to cook for the first time!
Baton Rouge, LA
70806
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