Baking in a Cob Oven
Baking is very important to me. I have baked all of our household bread for years, and my first thought when meal planning is for dinners that bake in the oven. When we were anticipating our move off grid, baking was heavy on my mind. We have a small air fryer-oven contraption that will run off the solar, but it is small, and pulls a lot of energy. It was not sustainable. As we have done for many things around our place, we turned to history; specifically, earthen ovens. Jason Townsends has a historical youtube channel and several detailed videos showing how to build and use a historical earthen oven. It looked simple, so we decided to give it our best shot.
The first step was to build a table, since I was not interested in baking at ground level (can you imagine!). Spencer built a very hefty table from 2x4s and 2x6s and two ¾” slabs of plywood and reinforced the daylights out of it.
Next, firebrick…or not! Turns out, firebricks are not cheap, and we would have needed several dozen. So Spencer mixed a heavy sand/clay mud, using clay we pulled out of the well. He built the floor in several layers, with a sturdy mud wall around it upon which we built the dome of the oven.
Building that dome was an experience! Townsends recommends building a sand “castle” interior upon which you then lay down your cob…but we did not have enough sand! So we stacked scrap pieces of wood on the oven floor and globbed wet sand over the wood until we had the basic shape we were going for.
The cob mud was again clay sourced while digging the well. We added what remaining sand we could and trampled old hay in for the fiber reinforcement. It took two layers of mud to cover the sand satisfactorily, and when it was dry we carefully pulled out the boards and sand a little at a time.
Forty-eight hours and a few drying fires later, we baked in it for the first time.
Words cannot express how excited I was to pull the first pan of baking powder biscuits, delicately browned on top, dry and flakey on bottom, from our cob oven. I had tried biscuits, bread, and cookies in a dutch oven in the camp-fire, but they either burned or went soggy.
These, however, were perfection. Other than the bit of ash on the bottom of the baking sheet, they looked just like they had come out of the oven of my old stove.
Gleefully, I pushed in my bread pans. They too, emerged beautifully browned and perfectly baked. Cookies next. Yes! Again, a successful bake!
Having our cob oven has made me feel a little more human in our extended camping experience. Being able to make bread, cookies, and quick breads to feed my family gives me a feeling of accomplishment. And, yes, knowing that if I can hold my hand in the oven for 10 seconds it is ready for bread, or which baking zone to use at which time, feels pretty cool, too.
