Mud Oven In Use

With the hot weather we had this week we were encouraged to try the mud oven I built last year rather than heating the house up while baking bread. We only tried using it a couple times last year and the results were so-so. Like most things in life, baking in a mud oven takes practice. I got a little carried away building this one and made it way too big. After some practice though we are starting to figure out the operating  directions for our model. Because of it's size and mass the fire has to burn for a long time to bring it up to baking temperature.

I started the fire the evening before and banked it with a couple of biggish pieces over night. This had the oven at about 200 degrees in the morning. I added a couple more big hunks of wood and left it burn slow until early afternoon.A hour before Ann was ready to start baking I built up a big blaze with small very dry wood that burned for about 30 minutes. Then I cleaned it out and let the heat soak in. When I opened it up for Ann to put in the scones , top pic,  it was at 450 degrees. They came out and five loaves of bread went in. After the bread was done in about a hour, Ann put in potatoes to bake, they were done about an hour and a half latter. The pic of bread isn't very good, the loaves were the same beautiful golden brown as the scones. There is a previous post about the mud oven in the archives, January 2012, if you want to see more about the
oven.