A how-to class morphed into building a bread oven when we learned how to make an adobe brick one day.
A couple of students and I put together a quick form for making a few adobe bricks. They came out surprisingly solid and set us to wondering what we could build with handmade bricks.
I looked up hornos online and we decided to build one. It was a long process. It turns out that making 200 bricks is considerably more work than making three bricks. And that was just what we needed to build the base.
Max Gay’s father Robert brought in a book on earth oven construction that turned out to be invaluable in the construction of the dome.
It took several months and many hands mixing many batches of mud and straw, but we completed it,
including a hand made bread paddles that Soren made just a few days before school was out. Next year we’ll have baking days and maybe one day a month when we bake a bunch of loaves of bread.
Good work to all those who participated! We have a functioning wood-fired bread oven that should provide service for years to come.
—- Chris Schulz
