Baking
First of all, here are some pics of what is coming out of the oven. I'm not yet entirely satisfied with the bread baking though as it requires more precise temperature/humidity conditions than for a simple pizza. I'm still in the process of figuring out the ideal bread baking conditions.
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| Baguettes de tradition! |
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| Hope it will be enough for my breakfast... |
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| Fresh baguettes |
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| Pizza at last! |
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| Well, yes, that's just for my breakfast |
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| Not worth baking just one loaf n'est-ce-pas? |
Here's a video of the oven at different stage of heating:
Fresh Breads!!
Oven performance
Overall, I'm quite happy with how the oven performs. The insulation is pretty good, and allows me to heat fast and retain heat for a long time. For pizza, I can use minimal wood to reach the desired temperature (~450 degrees) in about 45-60 minutes which is good enough to bake a few pizze. If I want to saturate the oven with heat - where the whole oven thermal mass is at 450 degrees, I need several hours of heating.
The retained heat is around 200 degrees the next day and allows me to cook other stuff.
The third day the temperature is about 100 degrees and can be used to reheat leftovers or to slow cook a creme brulee.
I use the remaining heat to dry wood for the next fire.
By the way, I bought a Star Wars like laser infrared thermometer to read the temperature at different points in the oven (I bought this one but opened it and disconnected the annoying and useless beep).
So far so good!
By the way, I bought a Star Wars like laser infrared thermometer to read the temperature at different points in the oven (I bought this one but opened it and disconnected the annoying and useless beep).
So far so good!
Post construction thoughts
After spending all this time studying the question and building my oven, here's how I could summarise my experience:- First, I'm really happy that I brought this project to fruition and I don't regret starting it despite the difficulty and the fact that I'm not a mason. So if you are thinking about building your oven, you should go ahead. But it's really important that you are well prepared and read as much as you can on the subject. The reward at the end is great!
- I might have done a bit too much of overthinking when studying the project: there should be a good planning of course, but as I said earlier, I'm not building the Millaut bridge, so some pragmatism is probably needed. For example trying to achieve a perfectly tight dome with tapered bricks might be overkill and not necessarily that useful. It also takes much more time to build. If I had to do it again, I might do it with straight bricks.
- I was constrained by space, and thus opted for a minimal arch entry depth. In these conditions some smoke is coming out from the oven door when I start the fire. This is only a problem when the fire starts - once the temperature increases, the draft is enough to pull everything through the chimney. I'll make a deeper arch entry the next time.
- more to come ...