Cob ovens are our favorite starter project. They incorporate many different elements of earthen building, as well offer an end result that you can interact with and engage your community with pizza parties and other food centered gatherings.
In its most simplistic form, a cob oven is a rounded, earthen vessel, with space inside for a fire. The earthen material holds the heat from the fire, allowing you to cook with the residual heat stored in the thermal mass of the earth that creates the oven walls. For millennia we have cooked with fire in a variety of ways, and this oven is just one of the many many ways we use heat from fire to cook food. In today’s world we are very disconnected from most of what sustains us, and reconnecting with the basic elements of fire and earth to cook our food and nourish our families and communities, is one palpable way to reconnect to one aspect of our sustenance.
Cob ovens are built with a combination of earthen materials. There are wood fired earthen oven found all over the world. The specific design that ours originates from is from Quebec. Traditionally build using bent willow to create the void inside, our design has been adapted to use damp sand as the formwork on the inside of the oven, to create a smoother interior surface. This sand gets dug out of the oven once it is finished.
There is a range of how simple, or how elaborate you want to get with your building project. It’s important to remember that historically ovens were built with mostly just earth. Today we integrate in fire brick for the cooking surface, as well as other details to make it more efficient. But please remember, you can also do a very basic functional oven, with little more than some soil found underfoot.
