Building a Masonry Bread Oven
In the first half of 2001, three of our intrepid members (namely, Ed Williams, Chuck Martin, and Nick Scott), with other members in tow, built a wood fired masonry oven at Cadron Settlement Park. The oven is patterned after the French ovens still found on farmsteads across the province of Quebec, Canada. We began hand hewing the logs for the oven base in January 2001 and laid the concrete foundation in March. We finished the oven in July and made out first loaves of bread the first weekend of October. EARA regularly holds events at Cadron Settlement Park that feature the use of the oven.
The paragraphs below describe how the oven was built.
This hewing process took quite a while, so in between whacks, we poured the concrete foundation in March. It is 4- by 6- by 6-feet.
her younger sister Katie took over.
Laurine Williams put stucco on the upper concrete slab. The bricks are lined with foil to give a space between the bricks and the concrete top to allow for heat expansion of the bricks. Wire is in place to give the concrete strength. Also, look at the door and you will see a wooden form used the build the arch. We used another arch to build the dome. The process is to start laying brick at each end of the form and the last brick, the one in the middle, should fit real tight.
Wooden forms are placed to allow for 3 to 4 inches of concrete to cover the bricks.
On July 21, the oven was finished with a stucco coat of earthen red.