El Horno: Oven building diary

"Good food is always a trouble and its preparation should be regarded as a labour of love..."
(from "French Country Cooking", Elizabeth David)

27/8/99
Stephen and I went to Clint's Crazy Bargains and picked up a tub-shaped basket - just in from who knows which Third World country - for $23.50. We'll cut it in half for the template.

Next we went to Bairnsdale Stove Heaters and Barbeques to see our friend Lili and get some "hot stuff". Lili will give us more than a great price on firebricks and a bagful of refractible concrete called Densecrete. She let us take the stuff away and settle the account later, and said we could return whatever we didn't use. She let us take a second-hand flue for free: we could cut off what we want and chuck the rest.

The next stop was Dahlsen's for a piece of aluminium flashing for $10.

28/8/99
Today we're supposed to be starting the horno, but the day is full of a steady, medium rain that the countryside desperately needs, so we can't whinge. Instead, Stephen headed off to the farmer's store to buy some straw. After that, we attached the trailer to the 4WD and headed to his folk's place to get the adobe dirt. Stephen's brother got on the front end loader and we followed him to the gravel pit. He put four loads of dirt into the trailer and it was a heavy load! The wheels looked flat.

I couldn't help smiling at the quality of the dirt: it's red and sticky, with big chunks of white clay throughout. It'll make a fabulous, strong adobe.

29/8/99
We didn't get up as early as we'd like, and we bit our lips, hoping we'd have enough time to finish the job.

First, Stephen flattened, re-flattened, filled, poked and prodded the surface to make sure it was perfectly level. He's a stickler and drives me nuts sometimes, but the horno will be better for it.

We scrounged the bricks from various places in our property. We arranged them, five rows of five, with about 2.5cm gap between them, and swept the clayey dirt into the gaps.
We watered it in, and waited for it to settle, repeating the process four times.

Time for lunch!

Apres lunch:
We mixed up the first batch of Densecrete. It's just like concrete. We spread it on the bricks, and arranged the fire bricks in three rows of five. When we were nearly, done, disaster!

I was handing Stephen the bricks. He was nearly done and said, "Keep 'em coming!"

I looked in the box.

"There's no more left!"

We were one brick short! So we moistened the Densecrete and dashed off to Lili's for the additional brick. She was apologetic, but we didn't have much time left so I couldn't stop to chat. I'm glad I did speak to Lili's husband, Ray, for a few minutes though. He'd been doing a little research on my behalf and a man who builds brick ovens for a living told him it is very important to have the chimney on the front, and not the back or top. He said that the air coming in through the door can completely bypass the fire before going out of a top or rear chimney, but having it in front forces the air through the fire. I was glad he told me this, because we were going to have it in the rear!

Next, we mixed up the adobe. There is no formula to this, we were told. Just dirt, straw, and water. It sounds like one of my mother's infuriating recipes! "How much straw?" "As much as you need." "How much water?" "Enough to make the consistency you want". You get the idea.

We didn't put in much straw: just a few big handfuls to a wheelbarrowload of dirt. With the amount of clay in the dirt, I knew it would be cohesive enough. I hosed in enough water to make a paste that I could ball up in my hands. Mixing it was hard work! At first, I tried using my hands, and then Stephen came to help with the shovel. A great workout! Getting the straw distributed through the whole mass is quite difficult, so quickly we learnt to place alternating layers of dirt and straw in the wheelbarrow before moistening. We were told that dirt for adobe is allowed to have stones and lumps but none bigger than a walnut; we were pleased to find our stones were only small but there were quite huge lumps of clay. We broke up the lumps of clay with the shovel and our fingers.

Next Stephen sawed the basket in half. Bits of cane went flying everywhere, but with me to help hold it in place he was finished fairly quickly. Released of its tension, however, the basket half was wider than when originally measured and thus bigger than the base, so Stephen brought it back into shape with wire. Cutting the flue was a trial too, since we don't have an electric saw (other than the chainsaw!) or even tin snips, so Stephen got lots of exercise sawing off the piece of flue we wanted. He cut the top flat, and the bottom on an angle so that it would attach to the basket neatly.

We covered the basket with newspaper, fastening it on with masking tape, and began applying the Densecrete. I worked on the top down as far as I could, then from the bottom up as far as I could. My original idea was to let the Densecrete harden completely before applying the adobe, but we decided that both the Densecrete and adobe were thick enough to apply the addobe on top of the wet Densecrete. Applying adobe over the Densecrete on the bottom gave me a ledge to work on.

This took a long time! White I applied the Densecrete and adobe, Stephen decided that rather than have the flashing on the front, Densecrete would be better. He got a perforated square plastic tray, and stuck it on the front where we wanted the door. Then he fastened cardboard all around it to seal up the gaps, and began covering it with Densecrete. Immediately it looked better. We decided this will hold in heat better than the flashing, and Stephen will use the tray for a template for the door, so it should fit perfectly. He might even make the door out of adobe or Densecrete! This would indeed be heavy, but would also fit the door exactly, and that would be terrific. Heat retention is the key in baking in a wood-fired oven, and a good door helps a lot.

Slapping on the adobe was dirty, hard work. We had a minor disaster at one stage when the back began to collapse like a slow but deadly landslide. The sides had the curve of the basket to support it, but the back was completely flat. If I had to do this again I would build a false sloping back out of cardboard to support the adobe. At any rate, for now Stephen helped suport and patch up, and all was well. This went on until dark, and when we finally had to call it a day, we decided that the back didn't have enough adobe. We were going to Melbourne the next day and couldn't do it then, so it would have to wait another day. We placed a tarp over the termite mound-looking oven and left it alone.

31/8/99
I am so sore! All the bending, squatting, kneeling, reaching, moulding, etc., has paid its toll and I found muscles in my thighs I didn't know I had. I thought I was fit, but nothing prepared me for this! I told Stephen to put the rest of the adobe on himself. Looking at it in the daylight, we could see that we didn't have the 10-12.5cm thickness of adobe we needed, so he had to apply it more or less all over the whole thing. Again - Stephen's perfectionism means that this took a long time, but it looks great. It was almost dark when he finished. He lovingly spread the tarp over it, and we settled for the wait.

4/9/99
The oven is drying beautifully. It has been a very mild week and the last couple of days have been warm enough to feel like summer. Combined with the usual Spring winds, it means the oven got very firm very fast. The front of the oven especially, since it gets more of the sun and wind, is now pale and hard as a rock. Some cracks have begun to appear, which is normal, but we'll fix these after the first firing with a light adobe slurry. All these days we have been taking off the tarp, and putting it back on at night and when it looks like rain.

We've had a couple of people remark on how low to the ground it is. Hornos in Argentina (and elsewhere, I suspect) are made on a wooden platform, but to be frank, I hadn't thought about this! I do not foresee a problem with kneeling or bending down to put in, check, or take out stuff. Already we're talking about a second oven (we have half a basket left, after all!), and Stephen has come up with the brilliant idea of using the first one as the base for the second. Then we could have a double-decker oven! But as it is, our horno looks like a cross between an horno and an Anglo Saxon "ofn".

My birthday is on the 10th. I'd like to light the first fire then. Now THAT would have to be better than candles!

9/9/99
Stephen made the door today. We had a very light, square, ceramic firebrick Lili gave us that wouldn't be sold because it was broken. It's top of the range stuff: fragile, but very heat-retaining. Because of its lightness, Stephen thought it would lighten our Densecrete door.

First, Stephen put a layer of Densecrete into the plastic tray. Then, he set the firebrick into it, and sat two trowels on top. Then he poured more Densecrete over the top, sealing up the gaps between the tray and the firebrick, and burying the firebrick and bases of the trowels. It didn't take long to set, et voila! A snug-fitting door that's not even half as heavy as what I thought it would be - with two dinky handles to boot.

11/9/99
The big day! So much for my birthday: it was a rotter of a day and I decided to wait 24 hours until the world didn't seem like such an inhospitable and alien place.
Stephen cut off the wire with his wire snips, and we piled in paper and fine brittle twigs. We matched it, and voom! Up it went. The cane and paper, however, were harder to set alight than what I initially thought. I tried putting in larger pieces of wood, but found these did not give the high, leaping flames necessary to reach the sides and top of the basket. Fast and furious was the key here. The so-called larger wood was not large, indeed it was as puny as my four-year-old's arm, but I removed it and decided to just continually feed the fire with kindling. The high flames began to lick at the cane and soon it caught fire. Because of the varnish on the basket, the smell was none too pleasant, and when my eyes started watering I kept right out of the smoke's way.

Smoke has its purpose and it was at this point that we saw it snaking out of a crack in the rear: site of the great mudslide. Obviously we didn't patch it up as well as we thought (or hoped), but no matter: it's fixable.

It took over an hour to burn away the cane and paper, and after that I began adding larger wood. We fed the fire over a few hours to bake the adobe. During this time we felt the adobe on the outside go from Oh See How Nice and Warm It Is to The Touch, to For Heaven's Sakes Kids Keep Out of the Way Do You Want To Spend Christmas in The Intensive Burns Unit. It radiated a lot of heat, and there was a wavy haze over the chimney. The chimney is actually something to be wary of. It draws very well, and sudden gusts of wind make flames leap right out of it. The top part of the entrance turned dark and sooty. I like it like this! I had toyed with the idea of latex paint but no, this is how this one will stay. Maybe my next one will be purdy and genteel, but for highly emotional reasons, I want to be reminded of the dirt under my hands.

El Horno Picture Gallery

"Novelty! It is the prevailing cry; it is imperiously demanded by everyone... What feats of ingenuity have we not been forced to perform... I have ceased counting the nights spent in the attempt to discover new combinations, when, completely broken with fatigue of a heavy day, my body ought to have been at rest."
("A Guide to Modern Cookery", G.A. Escoffier)