Make an Adobe Oven

Benefits
Environmental Benefit: ★★★★★
No gas or electric resources consumed to heat an oven or to cool your house back down afterward.

Money Saved: ★★★☆☆
Cheap to make using local materials, and practically free to run! Can use wood from pruned tree branches from your yard to heat it, and all those advertising mailings as tinder to start it.

Lifestyle Benefit: ★★★★☆
Enjoy a cool house in the summer, and great tasting breads, pizza, etc. year round! Also makes a great conversation piece for the yard. Can be quite decorative depending on how you make it. It admittedly takes a little more effort to use (compared to a modern range) due to the preheating steps.

What We Did
Here in central Texas we have a lot of clay in our soil, which makes a great building material. Shannon (pictured) built this adobe oven in our backyard using clay from the yard, plus a few bags of sand from Home Depot, a little straw, and some chunks of concrete found on freecycle (someone had broken up their driveway to replace it). She also bought a few firebricks for the oven floor from a local fireplace store. I helped out by making the door for her from some scrap lumber, as well as one of those flat spatula thingies (still can't remember what they're called) with a long handle that you use for scooping the bread out afterward (so you don't burn your hands). Her sister Carrie who was visiting also helped with the construction. The kids had lots of fun mixing the adobe with their bare feet on a tarp. It took a couple of hours effort on several different days to build, as there are stages where you have to wait for the previous layer to dry or harden - but it really wasn't a major undertaking to make.

To use the oven you simply build a fire inside it (with the door off to allow air in and smoke out). When the fire has burned down, you brush out the ashes and coal and add whatever you want to bake (breads and vegetables work best) and replace the door to keep the heat in. An oven thermometer is useful to judge the temperature. It stays hot for hours - you can use it for several hours of baking once it is heated up. Gives a great smokey flavor to pizza!

Links
This link will take you to some instructions for making an adobe oven, using much the same approach that Shannon used for this one. Note that there are a lot of different variations possible, so do a little research if you're thinking of building one!

http://www.ehow.com/how_5701123_build-outdoor-bread-oven.html

A Little Humor
Alice was to bake a cake for the Baptist Church ladies'group bake sale in Tuscaloosa, but she forgot to do it until the last minute.She remembered it the morning of the bake sale and after rummagingthrough cabinets she found an angel food cake mix and quickly made it whiledrying her hair, dressing and helping her son Bryan pack up for Scoutcamp. But when Alice took the cake from the oven, the center had dropped flatand the cake was horribly disfigured. She said, "Oh dear, there's no timeto bake another cake." This cake was so important to Alice because she didso want to fit in at her new church, and in her new community of new friends.So, being inventive, she looked around the house for something to buildup the center of the cake. Alice found it in the bathroom -- a roll of toiletpaper. She plunked it in and then covered it with icing. Not onlydid the finished product look beautiful, it looked perfect!Before she left the house to drop the cake by the church and headfor work, Alice woke her daughter Amanda and gave her some money and specificinstructions to be at the bake sale the minute it opened at 9:30,and to buy that cake and bring it home. When the daughter arrived at the sale,she found that the attractive, perfect cake had already been sold.Amanda grabbed her cell phone and called her Mom.Alice was horrified. She was beside herself. Everyone would know, whatwould they think? Oh my, she wailed! She would be ostracized, talkedabout, ridiculed. All night Alice lay awake in bed thinking about peoplepointing their fingers at her and talking about her behind her back.The next day, Alice promised herself that she would try not to thinkabout the cake and she would attend the fancy luncheon/bridal shower atthe home of a friend of a friend and try to have a good time. Alice did notreally want to attend because the hostess was a snob who more than oncehad looked down her nose at the fact that Alice was a single parent and notfrom the founding families of Tuscaloosa, but having already RSVP'd shecould not think of a believable excuse to stay home. The meal was elegant,the company was definitely upper crust old South and to Alice's horror, theCAKE in question was presented for dessert.Alice felt the blood drain from her body when she saw the cake, and shestarted out of her chair to rush to tell her hostess all about it, butbefore she could get to her feet, the Mayor's wife said, "What a beautifulcake!" Alice, who was still stunned, sat back in her chair when she heardthe hostess (who was a prominent church member) say, "Thank you, I baked it myself."Alice smiled and thought to herself, "GOD is good."