Saint Paul Bread Club (SPBC) Quest for Ovens

Last major update to these pages was on 09/04/2010.

The “I” and “me” on these pages refer to David S. Cargo, who maintains these pages.

Retained-heat ovens provide the best place to bake bread, but they are no longer the mainstream way to bake bread. (For thousands of years they were the top technology for bread baking.)

Usually these ovens are heated by burning wood, but sometimes they are heated by electricity or natural gas.

They are also used for baking pizza the traditional Neapolitan way.

Ovens in the Wild

Do you know of anywhere there is an private outdoor oven, an oven in a park, an oven used as part of a business, an oven in a garden, an oven in a school, or a community oven? If you do, please let me know (David S. Cargo).

(Or if you teach or know of an oven-building class, please let me know.)

People have told me that there is a trend toward people building ovens in their back yards, but I don’t know how true that is.

There have been hints and rumors of some such ovens, but usually little definite information. As I acquire information, I’ll update these pages so everybody can know what we have all found.

I especially want to know if you know of any community ovens or ovens in parks in the US, Canada, or even overseas; please let me know.

I am also interested in tracking newspaper and magazine articles (or web pages) about brick ovens, cob ovens, adobe ovens, etc. If you find any of those, please let me know as well.

If you have or are building an oven, but don’t want visitors, that’s fine. We will respect your right to privicy. Your experiences with oven builders, oven costs, zoning regulations, building inspectors, etc. could still be shared for the benefit of other people interested in their own ovens.

If you live in the Twin Cities and you build, own, or use a wood-fired oven, and you are interested in joining a group of oven enthusiasts, send me an e-mail with the subject of “Oven Club” and I’ll see if there are enough of us with an interest to make organizing it worth the effort.

The SPBC and Ovens

A Community Oven for Saint Paul

The SPBC has a long-term goal to get a publicly accessible oven where we can get together and bake. (This would be like Dufferin Grove Park in Toronto.)

On 6/15/2006 Ron Miller, Peter Glick, and David S. Cargo took a tour of 9 parks to see what features and facilities they had that might make one of them a suitable location for building an outdoor oven. At that time, the Saint Paul Parks and Recreation department liked the idea.

The parks department is willing to work with the SPBC to build an oven. Their main concern is security. Any oven that we build must be capable of being adequately secured.

Perhaps the neatest solution I have seen to this was shown in an oven built by Harrington and Hoyle Ltd., Landscape Architects for Alexandra Park in Toronto.

They put a wrought-iron gate in front of the oven so that if you could not unlock the gate (physical security) you could not access the oven.

There is no question that security features will add significantly to the final cost of an oven.

At present the SPBC does not have the money nor sufficient willing volunteers to make a park oven a reality in Saint Paul.

There are several outstanding questions that must be answered before a serious effort can start.

Where should an (initial) oven be installed?
Should the oven be built or bought?
How big should the oven be?
What kind of oven should it be?
How often will it be used?
Who will it be used by?
Where will the wood used to fire the oven come from?
Where will the ashes created by the fire in the oven go?

The problem of determining where an oven should be built is very multidimensional.

An oven in the wrong location won’t get used.
A brick oven is durable but expensive.
A clay oven is much cheaper but not as durable.
A big oven can bake more, but takes more time and fuel to heat.
A small oven can bake smaller batches, but might not be big enough for the demand.

This means it’s much easier to make a wrong choice than a right one. It might only be possible to determine what the demand is by building an oven and seeing who shows up and how much there is to bake.

A Park Oven for the Twin Cities

As part of a course at the University of Minnesota, Architecture 4282, Undergraduate Architecture Studio, Marcelo Valdes and 18 of his students have built an oven at Silverwood Park for use by the park. As of May 10, 2010, the oven was completed and ready to use, but the park is still working on the details of how the oven will be made available to the publc.

There is more information on the Park Ovens page.

Temporary Ovens

Members of the SPBC have built temporary ovens at The Landing (1, 2, 3) and Gale Woods Farm (4, 5).

The ovens at The Landing are gone; they were dismantled and the bricks sent to Gale Woods Farm.

The ovens at Gale Woods are now gone. Tim Reese sent me an e-mail on August, 25, 2009, that says in part, “Bricks for the ovens are here stored on pallets. I had to disassemble because we are getting ready for construction of an equipment shed in that spot.”

There is now a video feature about our work building ovens on-line thanks to our local television station, KARE-11. This link provides access to the feature itself. There had been a page containing a promo for the feature, but they took that page off-line.

The bricks have moved from Gale Woods Park to Silverwood Park, where they are used in classes on building portable brick ovens.

I’m hoping to make temporary ovens a feature of reconstruction work in parks undergoing renovation, but I have not had any takers yet.

Permanent Ovens

While the SPBC does not have a permanent oven, several members of the SPBC now have ovens of their own. Some of these are shown on the Private Ovens page.

Saint Paul Bread Club

We knead to bake!

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