One more note about the door.
Cob oven door.
Cob is a building material made from subsoil lacking organic material clay water and straw.
When the cob wall is finished an oven door and a chimney vent may be cut out of the cob.
Thus a plan was born.
In a traditional oven the door is sealed with dough clay or any other convenient method the idea being to retain the heat in the chamber for as long as possible.
An oven built well and protected from the elements could potentially last quite a while.
Then when the oven has dried you scoop the sand out which creates the oven cavity.
In the book build your own earth oven by kiko denzer and hannah field the authors mention that the interior ceiling height should not go over 16 but we ve seen and heard of other ovens.
The bigger the oven the more heat it holds and the larger pizzas you can fit into it.
The art of this kind of cooking lies in knowing when to break the seal and how to schedule your cooking.
If you still have a small fire pushed to the back of the oven for a longer cooking session leave the door slightly cracked to allow oxygen in and smoke out.
I will have to ask jenny about this.
With her oven at home jenny closes the door and covers the chimney at baking time.
Then a ray of hope when my sister in law described her back yard mud oven.
In order to get this cavity you build your cob oven around a pile of sand.
Also mark out the entrance area and door location this step will also help you visualize the next step of your construction and check that sufficient space is available for the walls of the oven dome and door opening.
The cob oven door holds in the heat plus evens the heat out inside the oven and on the floor so you don t have hotter and colder spots.
This one didn t have a door.
First i looked at the materials cost for a brick oven spoiler alert.
Though jenny built another cob oven at her home with a door and chimney.
Large loaves in the first batch rolls or smaller loaves might be possible.
The dome is 16 high which is kiko s recommendation for cob ovens across the board this one measurement is the most critical because it allows the oven to actually draw.
My door is adequate 1 5 thick kiln dried hardwood with a sheet of tin spaced about 1 off of the inside of the door but i sometimes find myself stuffing bricks into the door space in addition to it so as to.
For example a cob oven with a 42 finished interior floor diameter would ideally have a 32 ceiling height and a 20 tall door opening.
Ideally the pizza oven cob wall should be at a minimum of 4 inches 10cm thick.
The thicker the wall the greater the thermal mass resulting in more heat.
They are prohibitively expensive to build.
With this the cob oven can sustain a longer cooking time.
I used some cob to raise the entrance bricks up to the level of the oven floor and provide a secure adhesion to the block.
