Oven Building and Baking Intensive
Oven Building and Baking Intensive
Two hot ovens,, fresh-ground flour, and thousands of pounds of building clay. Join us for a deep dive into the firing, the baking, and the building of wood-fired ovens.
If you want to build your own oven or learn to use an oven in your community, this is your opportunity to learn alongside experts and other budding oven champions. Over two days of building, baking, and breaking bread together, we will have done much more than learn a craft; we will have created a network of bakers who are championing ovens for their community all over the East Coast.
Saturday, 9am—4pm and Sunday 9am—4pm
All meals will come from the oven, all materials included in the price. If you want to do a work-trade rather than pay full price, simply put in WORKTRADE for the discount code and receive 80% off full price. You will then be expected to work 12 hours for Backyard Bread.
Day One: If you want to learn Wood-Fired baking. you will have the rare opportunity to bake non-stop in two ovens fired side by side. Starting with pizza while the oven is 800 degrees, we will bake our way with the receding heat of the oven through ciabattas, sourdough loaves, rye breads, roast veggies, and slow cooked beans and stews. You will have the peel put in your hand from the start, so be ready to have flour in your hair and ash on your face. No baking experience necessary: there will be lots of baking and cooking to do, and students of all levels will be appreciated. Our experienced teachers will facilitate break-out groups and mini-lessons throughout the bake day.
Day Two: If you want to learn to build a clay oven, we will pull our breakfast out of the oven and then get our hands in the mud. We will guide you through some of the techniques and styles of oven building, and then we will unleash you on a clay pile dug on site to build mini-ovens. We will break at various times to share our work, eat our oven-cooked lunch, learn about how to design an oven base and an oven roof, and learn some of the thousands of years of history of clay ovens. For those that plan on going home and building their own oven at home, we have scheduled time to workshop your oven design in small groups group, led by our experts. Most people that build ovens for the first time spend too much money on materials and too much time doing unnecessary building steps. We will help you pay for only that which is necessary!