Nourish Me

brick oven: part 4

Back in June of 2011, it stopped raining just long enough one weekend for me to a) take a photo (one which, I think, shows how Dalek-like Peter's design turned out to be) and b) to get things fired up in there. You know, to actually use the thing.

Once again, Russell Jeavons displays a somewhat laid back approach to explaining how to fire up the beast, but we knew to expect that now, knew that it's all about learning how to use your particular oven, and, as such, there's no precise map to follow. So. Make a HUGE fire, get it burning fiercely and tend it for a good 2 hours or so before you want to cook. Longer is better in ours, but maybe not yours. It's one of those touchy-feely things. You'll need to shift it around a bit at that time, to make room for the food, raking out some coals occasionally. It'll take at least 2 barrows-ful of various kinds and sizes of wood. 

Peter took f-o-r-e-v-e-r to grasp that the fire needs to fill the thing. He kept leaving space to cook in, building small fires when, in fact, what is needed is a scary roaring fire (contained by the dome, of course). He is good at making that kind of fire, so once he was ready to listen to me reading out Jeavons' suggested scale, he decided to follow the rules.

I'm glad he finally did.   

Anyway, that was back in June. We made attempts from time to time to get out there and cook in it, but our timings were off, the rain kept pouring all damn year really, and the food coming out of it was, at best, lukewarm. We decided to wait until it was warm, sunny and dry. 

With family from Auckland here for New Year, our timing and the weather were, for once, just right. We got to work, a practice run of sorts, on the 29th of December.

Ta-daaa. First pizza!

(You'll have to excuse the exposure in the photo - too hot to get my lightmeter in there)

(Also, kale, sliced into shreds, arranged on top of your fridge-cleaning pizza then drizzled with olive oil before going in for a 5-7 minute blast is, I think, even better than kale made into chips. Just saying.)       

Pleased with ourselves? Hell yess.

New Year's Eve, Peter got his hat, workboots and kilt out and, despite the 40 degree heat, he had a ball firing it all up. A roaring (literally, considering the singed hairs on his arms) success, I'd say.

Happiness, in our camp, abounds.

The pizza dough I use is a Nigel Slater recipe, one I know by heart and the truly great thing about it is that it doubles as a flatbread recipe, so you'll only ever need this one set of measurements. Of course you can do it by hand, but there's something nice about knowing that the machine does a very fine job indeed. Makes 6 small flatbreads, 2 larger ones or 2 good-sized pizzas.     

Sift 500g (1lb & 2oz) of strong bread flour into the bowl of a standing mixer. Fit the machine with a dough hook. Add 1/2 a teaspooon of salt and about 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Dissolve 2 level teaspoons of active dried yeast in 300ml of blood-temperature water, add to mixer bowl and turn the machine on low. Stand back and let it do it's thing for about 5 minutes or so, give it a quick knead and then pop it back into the bowl. Dust generously with flour and leave to rise, covered, somewhere warm for an hour. Worry not if it's not balloned in that time; forge ahead regardless. Shape, pop on a flour-dusted baking tray and decorate as you like. In a domestic oven I preheat the oven to 220C and keep an eagle eye on things after 10 minutes, but about 20 minutes is how long things will take all up. In the brick oven? No idea what the temperature it gets to actually is - farking hot isn't precise enough, but that's what it is - and will take considerably less time to reach true perfection. If you've a pizza stone in either case, heat it up while the oven comes to temperature.              

brick oven: part 3

So, you've finished your base, built it solidly, let it all set nicely. The next stage is the dome. Jeavons suggests you "...start thinking of fresh-baked bread and your favourite pizza about now."

Do. It'll help, I swear.

You need about 100 bricks for the dome, each cut in half. There's an art to bolster-cutting (as opposed to machine-cutting) bricks, but as I was only there to photograph the aftermath, I cannot tell you what's involved. Peter tells me it's easier than you think, and far easier than Jeavons makes it out to be in the book. Be not afraid, therefore, of the cheaper, more physical option.

Our floor is recycled pavers, which make a great flat surface to cook on. That's the easy part. 

We had a steel arch made (the plans are in the book) for the oven door. "Have it made at your local metal fabricator or bash out your own at home." If you read that sentence (as did I) and thought, "what the? local metal fabricator??!!", let me assure you that The Renovators Goldmine in Trentham can help. Phew.

Then, you lay courses of half-bricks around the dome, rough-side out, backfilling with mortar, and angling each up a little as you go. About halfway through, you'll be feeling great, looking on it at the end of the day with pride.

Then - OY - you get to the part where you start to worry about your sanity, and WISH that your partner wouldn't be so damned afraid of following rules. Believe me. Bricks, being heavy, even when cut in half, do not like to defy the laws of gravity. 

This is the part of the process when I got a little peeved with Mr Jeavons. Peter had already lost it with his extremely casual approach a number of times - I think this guy's a bit of a knob - but I found his description of how to make the bricks meet at the top altogether too brief. Anyway, we fudged it and, using cardboard boxes and straw to form a kind of dome inside, layed the bricks - with a lot of angst - and finished the damned thing.

We crossed our fingers...then I noticed that Peter NO LONGER HAD ANY FINGERS. The mortar, combined with the sharp bricks, had eaten through his gloves and completely eaten away his fingertips. Mine were a bit rough and really sore, but his...fark. He was shaking...a brave man, mine.

Some of us needed a good lie down to recover. 

Others, namely me, decided to make chicken soup.

And even though the onions and garlic stung my fingers so much that I sobbed, it was worth every second, 'cos everyone knows that chicken soup is Jewish penicillin, right?

chicken soup, for a man who left his fingers in the wall of an oven

Take one good chook, give it a rinse, and pat it dry with kitchen paper. Place it in a large pot, cover with cold water and add chopped carrots, celery, onions, a head of garlic, lots of herbs (especially bay - bay is really nice, here) and a good lot of salt and whole peppercorns. Bring slowly to the boil, lower your heat to the odd rising burble and simmer as such for 2 hours, more if you like. Turn the bird halfway through, at which time I added quite a lot of lemon balm (bloody-bloody invasive-bloody lemon balm) and was glad I did.

Strain, pressing down with a wooden spoon to release all that goodness, and reserve some of the flesh for serving with the soup. Save the rest for the children who will, when they turn up late on Easter Sunday, tell you they've, "gone off chicken" as they've, "had it all Passover at mum's". Serve it to the dog instead, who has not.

You know what? Next day, we gingerly pulled the boxes and straw out...it worked! Gravity-defied!! Well. All worth it, thank you Mr Jeavons. All is forgiven. For now... 

brick oven: part 2

There are no rules for building the base for your oven, so you may as well demonstrate whatever skills or talents you possess, using whatever materials you choose or have handy.

(Russell Jeavons, Your Brick Oven)

We're living and learning.

Peter drew up what I suspect may be one of the trickier bases to get right, and I was a little sceptical, but part of the excercise - in fact, a very large part of the excercise - is developing Peter's large scale sculpting skills.  His design? An egg-shaped curve of a brick wall, one filled with rubble, levelled off, then concreted flat (um, flattish) on top. I love that my partner's not afraid of rules, that he likes to just get on with it, whatever the it may happen to be. More tortoise than hare myself, but I have to admit that the hare approach here gave things the very swift kick in the behind they required. We built the wall in one sunny weekend, making it up as we went along, he buttering bricks with mortar, squishing them into place, I tapping and levelling and filling in the gaps behind.

It's taken us a little longer than anticipated, and may just be the teeniest bit wonky, but the base (a-men) is done.

 

Incredibly labour-intensive work building things, even on a smallish scale like this and I'm feeling much stronger, far more capable in the physical sense, for having been actively involved. Aching in places that initially make no sense has been most amusing. Case in point:  I moved a tonne of bricks two-by-two across the lawn on the afternoon that they arrived yet it was my bum, and not my arms, that hurt the following day.  The next, too, but who's counting?

In the process of making all this happen we've found the guys at the Renovators Goldmine in Trentham to be outstanding. A neatly ordered warehouse of the old, the odd, the recycled, the repaired. We asked, they delivered. In spades. More on them as things progress.

On to the dome itself next week, the part that means that soon enough we will actually be cooking in the thing, indeed the step that is the entire point, and that is pretty damn exciting, people.  

brick oven: part 1

For years we've talked about building an outdoor brick oven, a project that requires that one owns rather than rents; a project of blokey, heavy-lifting proportions, and steep, rather physical learning curves. The book I chose to guide us through - much as I love the web, I trust print slightly more for such permanent things - is the Russell Jeavons classic Your Brick Oven: Building & Baking in it, not least because the foreword's written by our Maggie Beer, but also because it was the one book that customers undertaking such projects would reliably request.

What I like about Jeavons' approach is that it's organic, allowing for what my friend Elaine would describe beautifully as wiggle room:

"The purpose of this book is not to give you so much information that it quashes your motivation to build. After all, I'm not going to build your oven - you are! Building a brick oven is something that you do and that's what it's all about. Your oven won't be perfect, but it will be yours to live and learn with."

Oh, boy. There's a lot of wiggle room in Jeavons' text, and you learn pretty quickly that you'll need to employ your own logic along the way and, at times, google madly, but in truth, I see all of this as a very good thing. You become actively involved in the building, actually learn along the way, and gain (hopefully) real, lasting skills. If it was all there in minute detail you'd simply be following instruction rather than, ya know, learning, a little like cooking from a very precise recipe that produces a perfect meal, yes, but one that somehow lacks a little soul.

A soulful oven is what Jeavons wants you to make. I like that.

Stage 1 in the book is building the base but in fact, the true stage 1 for us was the concrete slab - up there in the photograph in case you were wondering - that the base will sit upon. Web-searching and drawing on memories of my father laying concrete when I was a kid helped enormously. We cracked opened a beer each at the end of very long day and toasted one another's effort. I'm proud that I'm not a girly girl. How else would it ever get done? 

A couple of weekends ago we had 500 recycled red bricks (each stamped "Glen Iris, 1956") delivered.

On to the base tomorrow. Watch this space.

quieter, stronger

Wake on Saturday to find it not just cool, but cold. Layer up, breakfast quickly, then hop into the car. The sky is an unpromising grey as we head to the market, but it’s big and clean from all the recent rain, and I know the weather's going to improve. It must. We've a concrete slab to build.

Swerve slightly, missing a rabbit running across the wide downhill run toward the dam, my favourite part of the drive, its white tail diving into the blackberried edges of the road. Slow down, wind through the turns, see water (still!) flowing over the dam wall as we cross the bridge, then back up, a steep and narrow climb. Horses hanging out by the fence at the top on a cleared patch of farm land on the ridge. I’d like to stop, but remind myself that it's good to catch moments like this from the passenger window, and leave them simply as they are.

The market is already busy. A chat to the elderly men who man the raffle ticket desk, all of us wrapped up against the cold. I write our address, they tell me they know it well, that it’s a good place to be. Things to do, so we've got to be quick. Find the greens stall, pick out fresh - very - coriander, a couple of bunches of watercress, carrots and radishes, replete with snappy greens and, pleasingly, a bunch of amaranth leaves. Tomatoes of all shapes and sizes next door, sweet yellow peaches and new season apples, bagged up with a wonky-toothed grin.

There are caged birds here, too, sold from the tray of a ute. Hens and peacocks, but it is the ducks, huddling together, that draw me closer. I want to take their photo, but I realize there’s a panic among them. Too many ducks in too small a space. Suddenly uncomfortable, I put my camera away.

Home to tea, and the makings of our first concrete slab, the base for a brick oven. It was a good weekend. All of this is to say that I love our new life, feel the rhythm of things beginning to make sense. I feel quieter, stronger, and happier in those deep parts of myself that, for a time, felt lost.