bread loaf

Saint Paul Bread Club

We knead to bake!

Other Links:

Location: Quest for Ovens / Burning Questions about Wood-Fired Ovens
 

Web Links for Burning Questions about Wood-Fired Ovens

This is to augment the material in the presentation and handout for my Saint Paul Public Schools Community Education Class, Burning Questions about Wood-Fired Ovens.

How I fell in love with WFO pizza: The Pizza Farm near Stockholm, Wisconsin.

Why wood-fired oven pizza is so good: link.

Sources of information

Community Oven Overviews

Community Brick Oven focused on organizing and building a community oven, there are links to existing community ovens. (There are also links to plans for building an oven, and is therefore a good resource for that.)

Community Oven this is part of my overall WFO pages, but it links to information about many community ovens around the world, and not just ones in Minnesota.

FAQs and Overviews

A quick search finds some potentially helpful pages.

Oven alternatives

For Pizza

Baking Steel

A baking steel is a thick piece of steel used inside an oven to provide thermal mass. It stores and returns heat. (It’s also possible to use it in a grill, mentioned in the links below.) Expect to pay about $85 plus shipping.

KettlePizza Pro

If you already have a 22.5” round charcoal grill, then you can add the KettlePizza to it to allow it to make pizzas. It’s not without cost (expect about $300) to add it to an existing grill.

Backyard Ovens

In some sense, small “backyard ovens” are a thing. Their sole purpose is to make some pizzas comparatively quickly.

What you can see is that you still going to be spending $300 to $600 for something that can make pizzas but not many quickly. These solutions are easy, but limited.

For Bread

If you want results similar to a wood-fired oven for baking bread, the best substitute would be a Dutch oven. Several bread baking books and recipes call for bread to be baked in a Dutch oven. Although often used for round loaves, there are other shapes as well. There is at least one product specifically for baking bread, the GURO Cast Iron Bread Potjie Poyke Pot Dutch Oven (for $40 from Amazon).

Other round Dutch ovens range in cost from about $40 to $80 or even much more.

They should all make great loaves of bread provided you use an appropriate recipe.

Sources of plans

A place that has plans: Building Resource Center - Community Brick Oven

Sources of examples

Links to Some Oven Resellers

Outdora Pages

Outdora WFO index page

Outdora Complete Ovens

Outdora Kits and Cores

Overviews and examples

Seller sites

These are the companies and domains related to sales of ovens, components, and tools for WFOs.

Yahoo Brick Oven Group

There is a Yahoo Brick Oven group for people who are interested in wood-fired ovens. Many of the members are widely-recognized experts. There are many associated useful files and photo albums.

Yahoo Brick Oven Group

Facebook Groups

There are several groups I follow on Facebook that are related to building or using wood-fired ovens.

Training Opportunities

If you want to learn the skills necessary to build your own WFO, there are a few places you need to keep in mind.

Mortared Brick Ovens

North House Folk School has had oven-building classes for years. They have changed instructors and even oven designs over the years.

Sometimes people organize classes nearer the Twin Cities; when they do I track and announce them.

Cob Ovens

I’m not aware of any local cob oven classes at this time, but sometimes the Driftless Folk School in Wisconsin has them.

Dry-Stacked Ovens (aka Portable Brick Ovens)

That’s probably obvious by now, but here’s my official link: Stack. Fire. Bake.