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Cob Oven

Jan 22
Love1

3 Cob Oven Design Improvements

By Cob Oven
cob oven design improvements

Last spring, I finally had the time to build the new cob oven under the timber frame pavilion we built in our 2019 Timber Frame Workshop. Our intention had been to use this cob oven to host monthly community pizza nights. (We’re doing that, although not in the same way I imagined it with the onset of the pandemic).

I took this opportunity to make some small but effective improvements to the standard cob oven design. After using the oven regularly for 8 months or so, I want to share those design enhancements and a few pictures of the construction process.

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Sep 27
Love2

2017 Natural Building Essentials Workshop Photos

By Cob Building, Natural Building Workshops, Cob Oven, Clay Plaster, Photos

cob stomping mixing

We recently wrapped up our September Natural Building Essentials Workshop. Fourteen folks came out to participate, traveling from Texas, Florida, Kansas, Illinois, and beyond. It was an enjoyable ephemeral community for the week — everyone was eager to jump in the mud and help out. I enjoy this workshop format because it’s a chance to spend some quality time with the basic building blocks of a natural home — clay, sand, and straw.

Read ahead to view a photo gallery of the workshop!

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Nov 20
Love1

The First Ever Rocket-Style Griddle Oven

By Cob Oven, Rocket Stove
Rocket-Style Griddle & Barrel Oven

The first fire ever in the first rocket-style griddle oven ever!

One of the exciting projects going up at the recent Natural Building Colloquium was this amazing rocket stove-style griddle oven. It’s a wood-fired griddle with barrel oven, both heated by the same fire — in this case, a downdraft fire similar to what you see in the now classic rocket mass heater design. This was designed and built by two mass heater wizards, Max Edleson of Firespeaking and Flemming Abrahamsson of Fornyet Energi in Denmark. It was the first of its kind ever built, and it was really sweet to see the griddle oven take shape over the week.

See below for a sequence of construction images and the finished product. Too cool. I wish I could have taken it home with me.

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Mar 29
Love2

Grand Finale: How to Build a Better Outdoor Pizza Oven

By Cob Oven
Homemade Pizza Party

This is the final installment of my outdoor pizza oven building guide!

If you’ve been following along with my “How to Build a Better Cob Oven” series — great! If you haven’t, you can catch up by reading part 1 and part 2. So far I’ve described how to site your new oven and build a shelter, how to prepare and build the foundation, install the hearth, door opening, and build the cob dome itself. So let’s see where we are now… I think it’s time to talk about insulation, plaster, and wrapping things up.

Here’s the final installment of How to Build a Better Outdoor Oven.

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Jan 25
Love2

How to Build a Better Outdoor Pizza Oven

By Cob Building, Cob Oven
Build a Better Outdoor Pizza Oven

Learn how to build this outdoor oven in this new how-to

Several years ago, I wrote about how to build (the now-infamous) $20 outdoor cob oven. That oven I built worked decently, produced a lot of delicious meals, and advanced my pizza baking fever to new heights. Since then, we’ve built several more outdoor pizza ovens, and each of them has been a great improvement upon the original.

This newer model is slightly bigger, allowing for easier access to the oven interior, it has even more food baking potential, and the insulation is vastly superior. This sucker gets hot, and stays hot… for a long, long time. The oven has a small roof shelter, protecting it against the weather, and a chimney keeps smoke out of the face of the fire tender. Best of all… the oven is still very inexpensive to build.

This is a very achievable, low cost, and effective oven that will not cost you thousands of dollars to build. Here’s a look at the new and improved outdoor pizza oven plans and how you can build your own.

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Jan 23
Love0

New Cob Oven How-to Series Coming Soon!

By Cob Oven

coboven-sandformMore than four years after I posted my how to build your own cob oven for $20, it is still the most popular entry on The Year of Mud. Clearly there is a big audience out there interested in building DIY backyard ovens. Gotta love that.

Since building several other ovens after the original $20 incarnation, however, we’ve made some significant improvements to our design, increasing the efficiency, the ease of use, and the baking potential. Needless to say, it’s hard for me to recommend the outline for the former design, because the new oven is so much superior.

I have finally begun an updated series on how to build a better cob oven, which I will begin posting next week. If you’re dreaming about projects you can do once spring rolls around, be sure to tune back in!

Update: Here’s where you can find the Better Outdoor Pizza Oven Plans!

Jan 06
Love0

2014 in Review: A Chockablock Year

By Wood Carving, Natural Building Workshops, Cob Oven, Photos, Timber Framing, Strawtron, Woodworking

outdoor-pizza-ovenI can hardly recall such a dynamic, diverse year as 2014. 2014 marked a transition year for April and I, and I’m happy to say that it was a smooth one. It was our first year living in the Berea, Kentucky area, having left Dancing Rabbit in the fall of 2013. This move was not an insignificant event, as I spent seven full and formative years in the northeast Missouri ecovillage.

I like to think back on the year past and try to remember all that has happened — maintaining this blog is actually an important way for me to be able to do that. It’s as much about documenting what we’re up to as it is a way for me to preserve some of life’s countless details. Here I’ll share some of the notable events and experiences of 2014, the year of our transition into a new life outside of Berea, Kentucky.

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Sep 02
Love0

A Pizza Dream Comes True

By Cob Oven
Pizza Oven and Menu

What pizza do you want tonight?

When I was five years old or so, I proclaimed that I wanted “to be a pizza pie man” once I grew up. That dream was rekindled in 2009 when April and I built our first outdoor cob oven, and this year we’ve successfully vended pizzas for the first time. I guess I can say I have reached that place of being a “pizza pie man” now, at 30 years old. In all seriousness, it was truly a thrill, a combination of many of my passions rolled into one very fun experience: natural building, pizza (duh), and feeding people good food.

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