found help elsewhere

are you talking the old beehive oven? we have marks on brick outside and you can see where it went out to the outside through a walk in fireplace. I want to have one put in. Its gone. sounds like fun.

Have a look at www.mainewoodheat.com . There's also a worthwhile book by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott called The Breadbuilders. It has usable plans for building a brick oven. Maine Wood Heat has both plans and instructional manuals.

We've had one for about six months, and use it for much more than just bread and pizza. In the spring, summer and fall, when it's too warm in the house to fire up the cookstove, we do most of our cooking in it. It's surprisingly economical to run--we fuel mostly with shed pine limbs from the woodlot--and huge fun to piddle with.

jrb, thanks for the info. We have the book, "The Breadbuilders", but will look at the Maine Wood Heat site also.

Jan

We have posted a set of free plans on the Internet to build a traditional round Italian wood fired oven. It is the design you see all over Italy, on farms and in restaurants. We support builders by email, and have a Yahoo! Group dedicated to building and using food fired ovens. Take a look at www.fornobravo.com, and click on the Pompeii Oven.

FB

Thank you, I've bookmarked the site and plan to dig into it soon.

jan

Here is some info for you just as an aside. I just saw a program on traditional Louisiana cooking and they showed how clay (concrete would work as well now days)ovens where made. You build your frame out of pliable branches to look like an igloo complete with crawl in tunnel and a small flue in the rear away from the tunnel opening. Then work in straw to wet clay and build up the mixture around the outside of the branches. You want to build the walls up to several inches thickness. Then you place your fuel wood within the structure and plug the tunnel opening. The fire will burn away the branches and you are left with a baked clay oven. I hope to try making one this spring. Heck never know till ya try right ;-)
Mike

I have a similar type oven I built out of rock. It works well for bread baking. Also helps heat my house in the winter.

Here is one that is built into my fireplace wall, like Herb's it helps heat the house. It uses charcoal or wood
for heat. Its great for grilling too.

{{gwi:886287}}

If you imagine that entire white brick wall in the photo made out of rough rock with a firebox towards one end and the main part filled with sand with fire tubes running thru it, that sort of describes my rock oven. Also includes a chimney that my regular woodstove is plugged into. IOW, two stoves and a large sand-filled heat sink. Upstairs a water tank sits on it.

Great oven. The Italian oven design is a little different. It is a round, spherical dome inside the oven, and the goal is to keep as much heat inside the oven as possible (for baking, roasting and pizza). You see chicken hatcheries below and drying areas above the older ovens in the Italian countryside, but the new oven installations are so well insulated that they don't put out much heat. The advantage is that they do a lot of baking for the small amount of fuel (wood) they use. Modern insulation makes a lot of that possible. Still, the basic design is unchanged since Roman times. That's why we call the oven plans the "Pompeii Oven." If you want to use your oven primarily for baking, this is a very good design.

The plans are free and are at http://www.fornobravo.com. Again, click on the Pompeii Oven button

Here is a link that might be useful: Pompeii Oven plans