THE CRAFT OF FIRE

I let the insulating layer of the oven dry very slowly, often covering it with a tarp if it was too hot out, and letting it dry more in the evening. I think it was about a week. I was also thinking about putting a finish on it - some people coat their ovens with plaster, for example. I liked the idea of a simple burnish.  When the mud is "leather-dry," polish it slowly with the back of a spoon and it'll shine. It's quite hypnotic, actually, to polish a mud oven with a spoon. You should try it sometime.     Here you can see the difference in finish. It's also a great way to smooth over any cracks. It turned out quite well, in fact. If I do say so myself. Finally, it was time to inaugurate our new backyard companion with the trial by fire.     And there it is: the mud oven reborn! We look forward to learning all about the personality and peculiarities of this one. And to once again having friends over, to enjoy all the social elements that fire fosters.

Years ago I lived in a Portuguese neighbourhood downtown and I noticed that most of the Portuguese families we knew didn't have front lawns. They all seemed to pave their front yards in brick, and maybe, if anything, they had a little tree or some potted plants for greenery. But brick was the design of choice.  'Please keep off the brick.' And I wondered why that was, and I questioned my cultural beliefs about greenery and gardens and grass, and compared it to other European traditions, and my own Cdn-South American background, and I really tried to figure out what was it about the Toronto Portuguese culture that would make them think that a paved front yard was so much better than a green garden or lawn. And really I was stumped. So, one day I was having dinner in the local Portuguese bbq chicken place, and a construction worker guy came in and sat at the bar. And when he turned his back to me, I saw the back of his t-shirt which read:  Love Comes and Goes, But Brick is Et...

The insulating layer for the oven should be made up of clay and earth and sand like the thermal layer, but most importantly it needs to have a lot of straw or light-weight filler material mixed in within it.   You want the material to be light and airy, to keep in the heat that has been soaked up into the thermal layer below it.  So I got a bunch of straw from my brother who has a couple of chickens.  I had dried grass that I had saved from the first time we built the oven. (What kind of a nutcase saves bags of dried grass? Me. You never know when you might need it in this Craft.) To shred it up very fine I figured out that a weed-whacker and garbage can would work well.  It does work well, but wear a mask!  Then we combined the dry mix with water and mixed it all up to produce a really good clay slip. Nice and creamy and muddy.    And then, in the wheelbarrow it goes, with lots of straw. The idea is to wet the material just enough so it sticks togethe...

A mud oven requires a lot of mud and clay and sand, so we set about breaking up much of the material from the old oven in order to mix it with the new stuff. (Once again, we were following Kiko Denzer's manual for building an earth oven, and more details of the process can be found here,  for the making of our first one.) (the lawn after winter looks... like we have a dog) Since it's Covid-19 the world over, we couldn't get the whole gang together for the mixing and mushing and stomping and crushing, so this time it was a family affair.  And since we didn't have enough sand (and couldn't go buy any) for the dome that forms the interior, we used some of the old earth from the previous oven and put it in plastic bags to make up space, which worked great.   We didn't have any newspaper on hand either, so we used paper towel to cover the finished 'egg' dome. This dome is in fact the empty space of the future oven, because it'll be scooped out later, onc...