Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Life Changes/Brick Oven

Hello hello, everybody. My senior thesis has been submitted, assessed, and returned: I'm graduating! Heyo! After a summer in Houston, I'll be moving to the Mississippi Delta in the fall to teach high school Spanish. Adventure time.

In the lull between senior exercise season and finals, I decided to look for a project. Since the school-owned apartments do not have ovens, a makeshift brick oven seemed like the perfect choice. Here's the current design, which one might call version 2.0 of the oven.

The walls are two bricks thick, the floor is one brick thick on top of cinder blocks, and the roof is a stout granite boulder. This is a huge improvement over the previous design, which was only one brick thick all around except for the roof. However, it still loses a huge amount of heat: as one can see, the boulder is not perfectly flush with the walls and support bricks. I guess I can't complain, since all of the materials were free.

Perhaps I will try plugging the gaps with mud and then wrapping the thing in tinfoil, as described by Hans Fugal on his wonderfully informative page, Brick Ovens for the Cheapskate.

4 comments:

Jason said...

Yo, Bread Party, I'm working on mastering a recipe for corn bread. Maybe I can get a guest post in?

Jacob Carroll said...

Yo this blog is awesome, not to mention hilariously inspired. As soon as the oven in my house gets turned on, I will be ambitiously following your every word. Come to Lake Village sometime and teach me your ways...

- Jacob

Nohemi said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Nohemi said...

Making your own brick oven is a fun thing to do, but you must have the best materials so that it will function at its best. The innovations in technology have been giving us the chance to cook in modern furnaces but still enjoy the taste of the original dish cooked in brick ovens. I hope you still have this brick oven, or at least have a better brick oven. :D

-Nohemi Tutterrow-