“Almost anything you can cook in your domestic oven, you’ll be able to cook in a clay oven, and in most cases the food will be better for it… So if you can find around two square metres in your garden, and three spare days in your life, you could build yourself something truly special. Your humble backyard could be transformed into a Mecca of gastronomy.”
What a great set of
experiments – firing up our new oven and cooking food in it to test out the
different ways things work…
We’ve done bread and last
week we made pizza. This week we think
we’ll try baked apples, roast vegetables (with fresh herbs from the Discovery
Garden) and possibly biscuits…
The practicalities of using
the oven begin to take a firmer shape the more we use it. It does take a good 3 hours to get to the
right temperature to cook bread and pizza and it does need someone staying with
it during that time to stoke it.
Obviously in a school this means that if we set the oven going at 9am
then its ready to cook by lunchtime, which works well if you are trying to cook
a class lunch in it, but not if you are wanting to make a mid morning snack!
If we want to use the oven
in a morning with a class then it might be that we set the oven going at 8am or
maybe we choose to cook a selection of things that don’t need the oven to be so
hot.
The pizza tasted great, year
5 did a wonderful job creating small pizzas with their chosen vegetable
toppings. They made very thin dough
bases but these still did need the oven to be incredibly hot in order for them
to cook through.
Making bread and pizza dough
from scratch is brilliant and I feel really strongly that all children should
be able to experience this. Food
shouldn’t appear in an instant and good things are worth working at and waiting
for! In our modern world we have
become more and more alienated from having to make things ourselves and
understand the time (and joy) it really takes to create so much that we want to
consume and use. But equally we may
need a few ways we can cook things that won’t need the oven to get so hot!
I’ve had some really lovely
feedback and questions about the whole process of creating our oven at
Dunkirk. It’s a big team effort and I
think a project like this wouldn’t work without that team of people wanting to
be involved.
I think one of the things
I’ve found really exciting is that the cob oven is like a work of art in its
own right (and creating it was an amazingly powerful community project) but
it’s a thing that is then used and takes on a life of its own. Its not an object that just sits there – we
interact with it, we create food to cook in it, we share food around it, we chatter
and we build friendships by sharing it.
In terms of having a cob oven in school it has to be something that is taken on board by a team of people who will use it and look after it.
If considering building one in school, some of these things are key:
You need some funds to
create a cob oven, but actually not much – most things you need can be begged
and borrowed and found. You can dig the
clay up if you have the right soil (we bought ours because our soil is very
sandy and we used about 10 bags because the children made cob models too), you
can find stone for the base if you hunt around and you can maybe scrounge a
bale of straw…
The materials are heavy to
move on site – we had to move all of the bags of sand from the builders
merchant, piles of the bricks which were donated and the concrete we used to
set the base on a firm level.
The building of it needs to
be overseen by someone who either has used cob or clay or who has an
understanding of the process, (there are a few techniques that need to be in
place when its built for it to work as a structure), so maybe the greater
expense is actually either paying for someone to come in and facilitate the
build or to attend a cob building course – or just the time to experiment a bit
beforehand to get the feel for the techniques.
The building of it needs to
be done by as many people as possible so that there is a real sense of
ownership and an investment in it.
You can only get a small
number of children round the oven when building it, so its vital there are a
set of interesting parallel activities going on alongside it.
Building it is messy and
wonderful fun – you need the right space, the right clothing and loads of room.
The cob oven sits on a base
of stone or brick – and that has to be put in place first (we are really glad
that our bricks were donated).
When built, it needs a
shelter building over it, which can be really simple but it needs protecting
from the elements, at least in the UK.
You can cover it with a tarpaulin when not in use. We have a simple gazebo at the moment but
are going to build a wooden structure soon.
When ready, it needs a few
people willing to fire it on a regular basis (so they need to thereby
understand safe ways to create fires and use fire with a clay oven).
It needs a team of people
willing to cook in it and make food with the children – and to experiment!
When it's being used, there
needs to be lots of other activities going on around it because there’s only so
long a class will watch a fire being stoked and collect / cut wood…!
There are some wonderful
websites with images and information about cob on them, I’ve found Kikko
Denzer’s book vital and also the River Cottage Bread Handbook by Daniel
Stevens.
“There is nothing in the
world as satisfying to eat as home-baked, handmade bread… it seems a shame that
bread has become so standard and commonplace, that we don’t even consider what
a small miracle a risen loaf is…”
the River Cottage Bread Handbook by Daniel
Stevens.
