This Cartoon Says it All

The Iron Door

For days I searched online for an outdoor oven door.   There were no posts with suggestions and even Google searches came up with nothing.  So I searched for 'iron doors' and found the wonderful people  at Teton Iron in Teton, Idaho.   They custom design oven doors at a great affordable price.  Our door weighs 60-lbs.  it has an oven thermometer that works excellently.  It is hinged and closes with a ball bearing that engages when pushing closed.   The medieval iron is the perfect look for our oven.  The handle is fashioned from wood on their property.  

Preparing the Oven the Portuguese Way

While Al was pouring and smoothing a cement pad, Carmina was gathering long sticks on the property.

 Here is Carmina scratching the floor of the oven with notched sticks to prepare it for baking for the first time.  She gathered cedar branches and tied them to the end of a stick for sweeping the floor. Carmina is teaching me everything I need to know about outdoor oven baking.  She makes amazing Portuguese bread!

Then we were all ready to light the first fire in the oven.

After a fire is ready and the oven is hot, the logs are pulled out onto the brick counter.  In our case they can be slid into the barbecue on the side.  Then while bread is baking, other cooking can be done with the hot coals and logs.

The door at the right in the photo was aluminum, made from a shelf on a utility cart and a vintage handle bought on eBay.  We put it in place and then had to remove it every time we needed to get in the oven.  Carmina and I discovered this was never going to work.  Too much heat loss happened this way and we couldn't keep the oven hot enough to finish baking the bread.

And now winter was upon us in December.

Clay the Oven Walls

So far, we were getting brick and curbing supplies from Mutual Materials, sand and gravel from Iddings in Kent, and everything else from Home Depot.  The next stage required we find a supplier of pottery clay.  In Portugal people have free access to clay.  But we didn't know how to get clay.  So our search came up with Seattle Pottery Supply where we could buy five, 5-lb. bags of red clay for $5.50 each.

By now it was October.  Ernie and I were happy to go meet our new grandbaby girl in Utah and that left Al and Carmina to apply clay to the oven walls inside and out.  Al is an expert at this technique.  They needed salt to mix with the clay and found that our Culligan salt for the water worked well.  The weather was cold, rainy and windy.  It was way too cold for mortar to set and impossible for the front design of the oven to get bricks to stay in place for the arched front.

You can see in the photos that this oven was getting bigger and bigger.   It was now large enough to bake 12-14 loaves of bread inside.  Once you stepped on the path to the backyard, our outdoor oven came into view.

We weren't home to take photos of the process of applying the clay.  But in this photo you can see how tall it is.

 November came and Al built the chimney.  He sure worked hard building this oven and through some really cold weeks.  

Constructing the Oven

Here's where design, engineering and shape gets dicey.  The light colored bricks are fire bricks, the best for lining an oven.  They take high temperature heat up to 750 degrees.  We lined the barbecue with them also.

The first plywood broke so we got a more flexible piece

from Home Depot that would bend to Al's specifications.

Now Ernie, Carmina and I were enlisted to help.

As you can see in the photos the day was getting 

colder and misty.  It was a real challenge to get

the mortar to set up and hold while Al placed 

fire bricks over the plywood frame.  Ernie and Al

had to place braces of wood inside and outside the

frame to keep it from moving with the weight of 

the bricks building up

Then it became imperative to put another piece of

plywood on the opposite side, with bracing

boards as support.

This was a huge challenge.

But if you could see Al's face, he was pleased.

The Next Level

Once the cinder blocks were set Al framed the next level for support of cement footing all the way around the oven.

After filling this center with dirt, the entire area was filled with cement up to the top of the framing boards.

Al can stand on the base and is explaining the next steps to Ernie.

The Foundation

Setting the perimeters for each of the 3 areas:  the side barbecue, the oven and the counter space over the wood alcove.

The centers were filled with dirt.

Al set cinder blocks for the foundation.

Ernie measured and cut and Al cemented the blocks as he built the foundation.

Al and Ernie worked great together and enjoyed the process.

Now the foundation was almost waist height.

Laying the Groundwork

Al immediately began breaking ground and leveling the site for a foundation.  At this point we weren't sure about the size of the oven.

First, cut out the sod and define the space.

No one can clear ground as fast as Al.  He is the most hard working man we know and proud to have him as our friend. 

Level the ground and decide the layout.

Mark the boards for the layout.

We give Al a lot of credit for envisioning our ideas without any plans or dimensions, just photos from the web and our trust that he had made these before in Portugal.  There, the ovens are attached to the house so the oven door opens into your kitchen.  Ahhhh, the ease of that!

My vision was a combination of the bread oven and a side area for grilling and dutch oven cooking.

 The shape took off and I started getting excited.

This was in August.

A Brick Path

Everything began by convincing Al Brasil to build us a brick path that winds to the backyard.  Before we could begin building an outdoor oven, we had to get a path going.  The best company to work with in the Pacific Northwest is Mutual Materials.  If you go through Home Depot, you can save a lot of money because they work directly with Mutual Materials.  I saw the design online, Hardscapes Old Dominion in Rustic Blend. Old Dominion is a pattern using squares and rectangles.  Al built a beautiful path.

And the path led to building a circular patio of course.  The circle was not easy to figure out either.  After a few attempts we realized that you can't just use the bricks you have on an extra pallet, but you have to buy the circle kit (another pallet was delivered).  Once again, Al got Carmina, Ernie and I working and he was a great foreman.  The circle made everything look even more wonderful.  A couple of side areas and pots full of rosemary and basil and the need for the outdoor oven was really feeling urgent.  It was August 2013 and we kind of decided to have our outdoor oven extraordinaire, Al, start laying the foundation for a small oven that faces the brick circle.

Let the fun begin.........