There had been talk and requests for a couple of years for an oven to be built at the NC for use during the Moot. This year Tim rose to the task by providing the materials, expertise and manpower in the form of a workshop.
I believe Tim ran the workshop on the Saturday morning and soon had volunteers treading and mixing £70 worth of refined clay and sand on a tarp. The base was constructed from alternately laid pairs of logs which were notched by Mad Dave with a chainsaw so they would remain stable when stacked. Though a little more height would have been desirable there were only so many logs available for construction. A few knees suffered later on when in use.
Tim had tasked the NC to provide enough glass bottles to provide an insulating layer under the oven and the NC made a concerted effort to fulfil the request by in fact providing far more empty bottles than were needed. It was an onerous task but someone had to make the sacrifice!!
A piece of tarp was wrapped over the top and then fire bricks were laid out as a base over the bottle platform. A sand form was created and covered in damp newspaper. A first layer of clay mix was then put over the top followed by a straw layer that had been mixed with a clay slop. A final clay mix layer was applied after that and then beaten all over with a plank of wood. Final touches were added, a door cut in the front and the sand form scooped out to make a cavern so a fire could be set inside.
The oven was then fired up and the fire kept burning continuously for the rest of the day and all night. The damp rubbishy wood we had smoked a lot so a large bag of charcoal lump was used during the actual cooking time that evening.
Whilst it was firing during the daytime someone just kept an eye on it adding fuel as needed. During the evening a gathering of enthusiastic guys got it up to temperature and maintained it for cooking pizza by adding charcoal and blowing it with an arrow shaft. A couple of guys were showered in hot embers from surprise blowback when doing this. They also soon learned not to get their hands inside and requested a long handled spatula for fishing the pizza trays back out of it.
Tim bugged out and didn’t attend the evening party therefore leaving us to our own devices to get good use out of it. Someone kindly provided a few pizza mixes and other ingredients but as the forest drums had already spread the word of pizza at the NC we ran out of base within five or so pizzas and we had the makings of a riot from the baying crowd. I had assumed that someone else was going to prep and cook the pizzas, oh how wrong was I?!
We raided the NC stores for every form of topping we could think of, luckily well stocked, and Anita came to the rescue in making up and forming the dough that we did have. Left with lots of topping and no base we had to improvise. Cracking open a 30L blue barrel which was full of tortillas, don’t ask, we made pizzas from those. Two volunteers, Claire and Chelsea, proceeded to construct various topping combinations and many of the crowd were impressed at how thin and crispy the pizza bases were!! We used two tortilla, one on top of the other with a sprinkle of grated cheese in between to weld them together. We just used Chilli pasta sauce etc under the cheese. We managed to push out loads of different combinations like this and obviously it was much faster than making bases from scratch. They cooked in about two minutes flat and went down extremely well it seems.
The next night we cooked a few shop bought pizzas, doable but a real step down, and we did Quesadillas style thingies with lots of cheese and Burrito meat filling etc.
Worried that the weather would destroy the oven over the coming year Tim suggested putting a roof over the top to protect it from the elements. Neil rose to the challenge by gathering the necessary materials (from Swindon no less!) and spending a few hours constructing a rather good design that Stuart is now nabbing for use in Belize and other far flung locations. My intention in creating this thread was to just post the pictures of said roof design but then I got carried away with the back story!
As I had been catering until silly o’clock pre and post oven construction and I wasn’t really paying full attention I admit there may be some slight inaccuracies in my account but you get the gist. Hopefully the oven will survive the elements and humans for use next year so we can try other things. I intend to instal a temperature probe so we can get it ticking along at 200[SUP]o[/SUP]C for general cooking rather than just pizza/incineration temperatures.
Perhaps those with pictures of the actual construction process can chip in to this thread to provide further incite and information to clarify the process. Tim?
I will try and work out how to upload all the relevant roof pics today with a short commentary.
I believe Tim ran the workshop on the Saturday morning and soon had volunteers treading and mixing £70 worth of refined clay and sand on a tarp. The base was constructed from alternately laid pairs of logs which were notched by Mad Dave with a chainsaw so they would remain stable when stacked. Though a little more height would have been desirable there were only so many logs available for construction. A few knees suffered later on when in use.
Tim had tasked the NC to provide enough glass bottles to provide an insulating layer under the oven and the NC made a concerted effort to fulfil the request by in fact providing far more empty bottles than were needed. It was an onerous task but someone had to make the sacrifice!!
A piece of tarp was wrapped over the top and then fire bricks were laid out as a base over the bottle platform. A sand form was created and covered in damp newspaper. A first layer of clay mix was then put over the top followed by a straw layer that had been mixed with a clay slop. A final clay mix layer was applied after that and then beaten all over with a plank of wood. Final touches were added, a door cut in the front and the sand form scooped out to make a cavern so a fire could be set inside.
The oven was then fired up and the fire kept burning continuously for the rest of the day and all night. The damp rubbishy wood we had smoked a lot so a large bag of charcoal lump was used during the actual cooking time that evening.
Whilst it was firing during the daytime someone just kept an eye on it adding fuel as needed. During the evening a gathering of enthusiastic guys got it up to temperature and maintained it for cooking pizza by adding charcoal and blowing it with an arrow shaft. A couple of guys were showered in hot embers from surprise blowback when doing this. They also soon learned not to get their hands inside and requested a long handled spatula for fishing the pizza trays back out of it.
Tim bugged out and didn’t attend the evening party therefore leaving us to our own devices to get good use out of it. Someone kindly provided a few pizza mixes and other ingredients but as the forest drums had already spread the word of pizza at the NC we ran out of base within five or so pizzas and we had the makings of a riot from the baying crowd. I had assumed that someone else was going to prep and cook the pizzas, oh how wrong was I?!
We raided the NC stores for every form of topping we could think of, luckily well stocked, and Anita came to the rescue in making up and forming the dough that we did have. Left with lots of topping and no base we had to improvise. Cracking open a 30L blue barrel which was full of tortillas, don’t ask, we made pizzas from those. Two volunteers, Claire and Chelsea, proceeded to construct various topping combinations and many of the crowd were impressed at how thin and crispy the pizza bases were!! We used two tortilla, one on top of the other with a sprinkle of grated cheese in between to weld them together. We just used Chilli pasta sauce etc under the cheese. We managed to push out loads of different combinations like this and obviously it was much faster than making bases from scratch. They cooked in about two minutes flat and went down extremely well it seems.
The next night we cooked a few shop bought pizzas, doable but a real step down, and we did Quesadillas style thingies with lots of cheese and Burrito meat filling etc.
Worried that the weather would destroy the oven over the coming year Tim suggested putting a roof over the top to protect it from the elements. Neil rose to the challenge by gathering the necessary materials (from Swindon no less!) and spending a few hours constructing a rather good design that Stuart is now nabbing for use in Belize and other far flung locations. My intention in creating this thread was to just post the pictures of said roof design but then I got carried away with the back story!
As I had been catering until silly o’clock pre and post oven construction and I wasn’t really paying full attention I admit there may be some slight inaccuracies in my account but you get the gist. Hopefully the oven will survive the elements and humans for use next year so we can try other things. I intend to instal a temperature probe so we can get it ticking along at 200[SUP]o[/SUP]C for general cooking rather than just pizza/incineration temperatures.
Perhaps those with pictures of the actual construction process can chip in to this thread to provide further incite and information to clarify the process. Tim?
I will try and work out how to upload all the relevant roof pics today with a short commentary.
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