Baking in an earth oven is a wonderful culinary experience. Also called cob, an Old English term for lump, earth ovens are built with layers of clay, straw and mud that dry into a smooth brick-like substance. This style of architecture has been used throughout the world, from the adobe homes of the American southwest to 500 year old cob homes in Devon, England. When properly cared for and kept out of bad weather, cob structures retain heat very well and can last for centuries.

Unlike the convection oven in your kitchen that simply heats the air around your food, cob ovens use three forms of heat transfer: radiant heat from the walls, conduction heat from the floor, and hot air convected throughout the oven space. This creates a blisteringly hot steam that caramelizes the sugars on the outside of the loaf and forms a thick, chewy crust. After cooking your bread in a cob oven, the results from your kitchen oven will seem bland and dry.

Building Your Earth Oven

There are numerous resources about how to cheaply construct a cob oven, often using predominately local supplies. I can’t recommend enough the book Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer and Hannah Field. The gorgeous earth oven just beyond our pond was built over five years ago by an AmeriCorps couple that used the book as their main resource when constructing and using it. When they moved on, the earth oven remained. Though occasionally used by the sisters during summer nature camps at the onsite ecology center, the oven largely sat empty and unused. Assuming it was just a prop when we first arrived, Ian and I were thrilled to learn that the oven was fully function and ours to experiment with. We’ve had a lot of fun playing around with it and I am slowly gaining proficiency with this wonderful tool. Below are my tips for getting an earth oven to produce your very best bread.

Using Your Earth Oven

Whether you build your own oven or inherit it like we did, cob ovens are dead easy to use with some prior planning. Give yourself two to five hours for the entire process, depending on how much food you want to make and the required oven temperature.

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