Build Your Own Earth Oven: A Low-Cost, Wood-Fired Mud Oven, Simple Sourdough Bread, Perfect Loaves (Paperback)

You don’t need a book to build a mud oven, but if you’re doing something for the first time, it’s nice to have company. So I tried to write a book that would provide decent company for anyone, beginner to journeyman (I don't claim to be an expert, but building with earth is not the domain of experts, which is why it’s so wonderful).

And since a good oven alone doesn’t make good bread, I’ve included a simple introduction to sourdough that covers what I think are the essentials for understanding what makes the difference between good bread and a perfect loaf — equal or superior to the fanciest $5 loaf.

As for me, I am a sculptor, and got my start from my mother, also an artist who believes in learning by doing. She taught me to make bread, let me skip school a day a week in sixth grade to learn ceramics from an expert, gave me a summer on a farm in France (instead of camp), and who encouraged me to go to Italy at 17 to carve marble. So bread and art have been constants in my life, but I learned to make ovens and really good bread by luck, when I spent a week learning about earthen building with Ianto Evans and the Cob Cottage Company. One afternoon, we built a mud oven. The next day we had lovely fresh bread.

That summer, in Minnesota, visiting my father and his wife of 30 years (my second mother), the highlight of every meal was Mary’s bread – wonderful, European-style sourdough the likes of which I hadn’t tasted since my 12th summer, when I was a guest on a French farm where afternoon snack, or "goutée," was a thick slab off a three foot loaf, buttered and sprinkled with sugar. Breakfast was the same buttered slabs dipped in a bowl of hot milk, chocolate, or coffee. It was thick, chewy, a little tart; the strong brown crust felt good between your teeth. Every time I dip toast in coffee, I remember that breakfast, and particularly that bread. But for too long it was a wistful memory, since the bread wasn’t to be found on my side of the Atlantic.

Seeing Mary at work helped me understand why my bread never matched that wonderful French loaf. First, she didn’t use commercial yeast, but tended glass jars of starter harboring cultures of wild yeast. She kneaded her dough a long time: 15 minutes by the clock. And she baked directly on hot bricks in the oven, with added steam, which was the closest she could get to the the "backyard brick oven" prescribed by her bread book.

When I heard that, I suggested a mud oven. She suggested the location, and I spent a few hot, sticky Minnesota summer days digging a deep hole (frost line in Minnesota is many feet down) and converting an old limestone wall into a foundation. That done, the oven took a day or two. It worked beautifully, and we had beautiful pizza and perfect bread.

When I visited my brother in New York, he wanted one too. Neighbor kids helped, and it came out in the shape of a mythical creature named (by a three-year old) "Goona Zoona." At his wedding, I baked nearly 20 loaves of sourdough in three batches in a single firing.

Later, I took ten loaves of mud-baked bread to a wedding party for a German friend — five sourdough rye, and five sourdough wheat. All his family and friends said, "this is just like home!" and asked where they could buy it. Some begged for a loaf to see them out of the land of Wonderbread. Then I made a portable oven to provide pizza for a local summer festival. My wife Hannah was head baker and made hundreds per day, each cooked to perfection in two to three minutes. People raved.

Like all art and craft, oven-building and bread-baking heighten your awareness of the cycle of life — that begins with fertile soil, sun, and seed, and gives us grain and flour and loaf and life. It is an impressive debt we take on; one we can only repay, in the end, with our lives and our bodies. Dust we are, and to dust we return. But it’s holy dust, and like the phoenix, it will be reborn in the next turn of the cycle.

These things are, in the end, beyond understanding, but understanding isn’t required. Bread is success! And creation is value — not because good artisan loaves fetch high prices, but because creation can’t be measured in cash. Value is a function of life. And life is not "making a living," earning and spending, but living and making. Time is not money. Money is just a means of exchange, and not a value.

To me, art is a true measure of value. Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi said that "sculpture must be lovely to touch, friendly to live with, not only well-made." Such is an earthen oven -- full, round, "lovely to touch, friendly to live with…." And while neither bread nor ovens are much immortalized in museums and galleries, they are art — they are the shaping of materials to create new forms and thus, new life.

Art is our common heritage, and if you become absorbed, even for a moment, in the creation of something new — mud oven or a loaf of bread — you know something that no one can teach and that no money can buy. Art – and life – merely ask us to participate: to watch, to learn, to engage hands, head, and heart in creating form and relationship; to celebrate and renew self and world; to be whole and wholly involved; to offer communion and to build community. To be an artist is no more and no less than to be human. Eric Gill said "an artist is not a special kind of person; every person is a special kind of artist." --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.