Pizza in the cob oven…

“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.”

the River Cottage Bread Handbook by Daniel Stevens.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

The cob oven is fired up for the first time…

 

We used the cob oven this week for the first time – very exciting!

 

We’d had some really sunny and dry weather but I knew that the oven was going to still need a lot of drying out time, so I wasn’t sure how the first fire would go…  It was an exciting experimental process and part of the discovery of getting to know the oven!

I was with Oak, the year two class at Dunkirk, all day, with their teacher Mark Woodings and their teaching assistant Michelle Loach.  Between the three of us therefore we were able to facilitate a whole set of things happening in parallel with the children.   Whilst at the very start of the morning I worked with a very small group to sort fuel and light the fire in the oven, the rest of the class had a wonderful telling of the Little Red Hen story, complete with lots of visual and tactile props.

Throughout the day, the class all made bread dough in groups – it was important they all had a chance to explore this (the whole school does a lot of cooking all year round, so using the oven is just a part of a much wider set of on-going activities).  We’re also hoping to have a bread week at school in September, where all classes can make a whole set of different breads and test out lots of different methods used around the world to bake and share bread.

Oak class have been exploring their self-generated  question of “how things move” and also recently been looking at space.  So as a brilliant hands-on way of exploring this they all worked in small groups to build rockets from old carbonated drinks bottles, which were then test-launched with Mark’s foot-pump.   It meant that we were launching rockets and firing the cob oven all at the same time (all whilst little groups also made dough and looked at yeast rising etc).   The rockets worked really well, some went incredibly high and I loved that happening whilst we cooked

 

Because we were on the school field and Discovery Garden (they are all part of the same area) all day it meant there was exactly enough space for all of these things to be happening alongside each other.  There was a wonderful host of questions, observations, thoughts and ideas all being exchanged.   The children could watch what each other were doing and had the physical space they needed to do this. 

 

So as I stoked the fire in the oven and cut firewood with some children, there were rockets being fired nearby and really interesting discussions amongst the children.   

There were also lots of loose parts being turned into potions, concoctions, images and stories…

 

 

It was wonderful to finally light the oven, the fire got going well but did need to be stoked a lot.   I didn’t want to make a big fire in it and I was wary of causing cracks with any sudden changes in temperature.  We had the oven lit all day and it did take at least three hours to get hot enough to begin to cook bread.  Its all an experiment and so important for the children to see adults willing to test and not always know how things will turn out.  The first batch of rolls came out a bit soft (“I’d like some dumplings” one boy said!) but were cooked through and had a great slightly smoky taste.  By the end of the day the oven was cooking the little bread rolls really well and had built up a great amount of heat.

 

You have to “soak” the oven through with the heat, it works as a heat-retaining chamber and it’s the residual heat that you cook with.  Its was really interesting seeing how hot the different parts of the oven became and which part held the most heat – and that’s important in helping us to learn how to cook with it.   Every clay oven is slightly different and I like the idea that you have to get to know your own oven!

 

We’ve not had a chance to make a door for the oven yet and I used a set of bricks to close the doorway (and thereby retain the heat) whilst we cooked with it – this seemed to work fine.  I liked the little bits of smoke emerging from the doorway, especially as they swirled around the little character that sits just about the door!

 

In terms of using a cob oven in school, it does need an adult with it throughout and there’s loads of practical aspects that are crucial – especially as you are using fire.   (One of the really important elements of my Forest School training was the health and safety aspects of making and using fire, safely, with children.)  The school needs to be committed to using the oven and have enough members of staff willing to do this – and that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about our cob oven at Dunkirk.

Building and using a clay oven in a school does feel a process that is making several important ethical points.  It’s about making things yourself – not buying them in ready made.   It’s about slowing down and understanding that things take time.   It’s about cooking and sharing food – and creating a social and community space to do this.   It’s about the ecology of the way we cook and use fuel and it’s about understanding where our food comes from.  It’s about the spaces we give to our children and to ourselves as adults.

 

Whilst we ate our bread we were able to take in all the other aspects of the natural world around us.  Damselflies are now busy in the Discovery Garden, as well as many bees, beetles, butterflies and so much more.  The pond has many small creatures in it.   Flowers are out, many different kings of leaves are about, there are very visible signs of the cycle of life – cuckoo spit, leaf-galls of various kinds are plentiful as well as some small remains of a couple of dead birds killed, we think, by a sparrowhawk (the children don’t touch these but are really interested).   These things provide crucial points for discussions about the natural world.

 

So, we hope to use the oven again at least once a week for the rest of term and we’ll get to know it more and more as we do so.   Its providing such a wonderful talking point and we’ve had some very inspiring conversations with families about cooking traditions around the world.   Many of the children at school come from a whole host of countries and either they or their families have first hand experience of cooking in many different ways. 

  

 

 

 

lanterns glowing

 

 Around 95 willow lanterns all a-glow last week at the culmination of Dunkirk’s Light Week.

 

The whole school has been exploring the ways light is used in different cultures and faiths around the world.  Everyone in school made lanterns working with Katy Doncaster and myself.  Really wonderful conversations have taken place around all of this and it’s been incredibly inspiring.

 

Despite the weather being against us, we had an amazing turn out for the event and procession through the streets, culminating in a gathering around the fire on the school field for songs.  Magical.  A huge thank you to everyone working on the project and to all who participated. 

poems, pancakes and planting

Just before half term I ran an inset for all the Dunkirk staff on the school allotment.  It gave all the adults a chance to really explore the space and discover the different layers of things waiting for them.  I'd put a treasure hunt together as a way of beginning to look at some of the things in the allotment, and this generated loads of conversations - between people but also between people and plants.

There's three of us at the school with the Level 3 Forest School Leader qualification, which is really exciting in terms of the work we can develop with the children and the support we can offer each other.  We lit a fire and the inset snack was cooked on that: toast, crumpets and elderflower fritters.  It was also a wonderful illustration of why a fire circle is so appealing.  It generated some really deep conversations about the importance of calm spaces for reflection, for sharing discoveries, for just "being" and why tinkering with the fire is so captivating.        

We all gathered things we found intriguing and used a simple, but really lovely poetry structure to each write a poem about the things we'd discovered.  We placed them all together and made a little museum of allotment treasures.

What I also loved was watching the different ways everyone chose to explore the space, just as a group of children might.  Some people wanted to be alone, some wanted to be with others, some wanted time to look and observe, some wanted to get busy with tools and others were really excited by the properties of the different plants.  A space like the allotment offers areas where people can do all of those things (unlike many indoor classrooms).  People laughed and joked and shared their discoveries, but they could also find solitude and space for contemplation - and also space for being quiet.

It was a really special opportunity to explore the many issues and educational opportunities offered by nature.  It gave all of us a chance to reflect upon what the children have been finding in the nature spaces at the school, but also to look at ourselves as both adults and to think about when we were children.