WIDE AWAKE OVEN
Our oven is something else.
OUR OVEN: THE HOT PLACE
We built our oven from nearly nine tons of brick, steel, and stone.
We guarantee you've never see an oven quite like this. Our oven runs on wood—no gas, no coal-fired electricity. We get our wood from right down the road, and we designed and built our oven to burn clean and hot. It is modeled after the great Spanish ovens of the late 19th century. Like those ovens, ours is a “white” oven, which means that the fire heats the baking chamber indirectly. And, like those ovens, our baking hearth is a large stone turntable. It's the details—the powerful steam, the pre-heated combustion air, the ceramic secondary combustion chamber, the multiple draft control gates—that make our oven extraordinarily steady and efficient.
HOW IT WORKS
SMALL FIRE, BIG HEAT
We build the fire in a small firebox, which sits low in the oven, well beneath the baking chamber. The firebox, constructed of refractory brick and cement, is insulated with a thick layer of closed-cell glass foam, which keeps virtually all the fire’s heat within the oven. The fire burns hot and clean, and the exhaust rises up an internal chimney into a domed brick chamber where it slows and spreads, sharing its heat with the tremendous mass of the oven. The brick dome itself sits beneath another dome, this one inverted and cast of refractory cement, which adds to the oven’s thermal mass and mellows the intense heat of the initial burn. All of this is enclosed by a sprung steel band, containing the outward thrust exerted by the interlocking domes. On top of the upper dome is a floor of dry-laid refractory brick, the floor of the baking-chamber.
LABRYNITHIAN PASSAGES
A WARM EMBRACE
From above, from below, and from about, the baking chamber is embraced by the wood fire’s heat. Suspended in the middle of the baking chamber is a 1000 pound stone turntable–the baking hearth itself—that is eight feet in diameter. The turntable rides on three wheels, and its rotation is controlled by a hand-crank aside the baking door.
CONSULTING
Wood-Fired Oven Design, Repair, and Modification
We help bakers consider the many available choices in oven-design, function, and construction, and we work with bakers to modify (or not modify) existing ovens to meet new requirements. Want to talk ovens? Drop us a line.
