Build Your Own Earth OvenA Low-Cost, Wood-Fired Mud Oven; Simple Sourdough Bread; Perfect Loaves
by Kiko Denzer $18
Build Your Own Earth Oven
A Low-Cost, Wood-Fired Mud Oven; Simple Sourdough Bread; Perfect
Loaves
by Kiko Denzer $18
Buy your copy through the FireWorks Online Store!
Paperback - 3rd Edition, 2007, 132 pages
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Review from Library
Journal
Denzer, an artist and builder, creates beautiful wood-fired ovens
using the most widely available building material: dirt. Some
earth ovens are plain while others are formed into the shape of
animals or human faces. Denzer offers an explanation of basic
concepts such as material selection, oven location, and design
and then guides readers through the construction of their own
oven. Earth ovens could be produced most anywhere using Denzer's
instructions; he even shows how to build a weatherproof roof.
A sourdough bread recipe is included. Appealing to a diverse audience
of bakers, outdoor cooks, traditional crafts persons, and perhaps
even homeschoolers looking for a project, this title should be
part of most public library collections.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
Build Your Own Earth Oven is a fully-illustrated handbook
for making a simple, wood-fired, masonry-style oven. It provides
clear, step-by-step instructions for building and firing the oven,
as well as complete directions for making sourdough bread in the
best (and simplest) artisan tradition.
Earth ovens are as simple as a southwestern horno or European bee-hive oven and every bit as effective as a fancy brick hearth or modern, steam-injected commercial oven. The dense, three-to-twelve inch thick earthen walls store the heat of the fire; after the hot coals are removed, the hot walls radiate a steady, intense heat for hours. The resulting steamy environment is essential for the crisp, flavorful crusts of true hearth loaves, and you can easily build it for less than the price of a couple of fancy dough-rising baskets!
If you like to cook outdoors, an earth oven can also transform fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs into delicious pies, pizzas, and other creations (one of my favorites is fresh vegetables, herbs, and potatoes drizzled with olive oil). Pizza cooks to perfection in three minutes, and you can even use the residual heat to dry your surplus garden produce, and incubate your home-made yogurt!
Building with earth is safe, easy, inexpensive, and extraordinarily effective. Good building soil is usually right under your feet! Many will find it in their back yards. Use it plain, or mixed with sand and straw. Build the simplest oven in a day! Adding a roof and foundation makes it permanent. The simple, round shape makes a beautiful garden sculpture, or can be sculpted into a fire-breathing dragon!
It is a project that appeals to bakers, builders, and beginners of all kinds: The serious or aspiring baker who wants the best lo-cost oven for their bread; Gardeners and outdoor cooks who want a centerpiece for a beautiful outdoor kitchen; People interested in creative uses of low-cost materials and simple technologies; and Teachers who want a multi-faceted, experiential learning experience for their students (the book has been successful with everyone from third-graders to adults).
Illustrated by the author with over a hundred drawings and photos, it includes color pictures of sculpted ovens and their builders, as well as further references on food, baking, and building.
"Earthen Art: Common as Dirt" by Kiko Denzer, Resident Sculptor at FireWorks Restaurant and author of Build Your Own Earth Oven. FireWorks Restaurant is home of Maya, a nine-foot high commercial earthen oven built by Kiko in 2002.
About the Author
Kiko Denzer is an artist, writer, builder, and baker who has spent
the last five or six years working primarily with earth.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT:
I've been working with earth for about ten years now, first making
ovens, then sculpting, then building a studio and a greenhouse
as well as various mud jobs, including garden walls, school projects and various
teaching gigs, and large installations for the DaVinci days festival
in Corvallis.
Earth is a natural material for sculpting and the combination of earth with sand and straw provides an extraordinary structural flexibility that dissolves the division between sculpture and architecture.
I started carving stone when I was ten, and still work in stone, wood, and other materials. But earth, and the revival of interest in it as a natural and environmentally friendly building material, have provided a context where art has an essential and practical part in a more sustainable cultural vision. Creation returns to its rightful place as a community endeavor, and people who wouldn't consider tackling a life size sculpture will gleefully build an oven or even a house. Sometimes, they'll even build a restaurant!
The work with patterns has been an inspiration reinforced from many corners. The garden is full of pattern, rhythm, form, and endless variety. I'm growing wheat to make our own bread, so wheat has become something of an obsession. I found a book about the women of Basutholand, South Africa, who replaster their houses every year and use a whole lexicon of traditional patterns to make otherwise plain walls into stunning art that also welcomes visitors and tells stories about their lives and traditions. I've used the same approach to make school murals to transform dead brick walls into vibrant displays of community, culture, and spirit. And finally, I live between forests and streams. Every fall I wait to watch the salmon swim up, procreate and die. The eggs hatch, the fingerlings swim out to sea, grow, and return again. Birds, bears, humans, and other critters eat the fish and (mostly) return the nutrients to the ground - basic material and essential nutrients flow between forest and sea. Fish, forests, flowers, and sea - all become one.
EARTHEN PLASTERS AND REINFORCEMENT:
Earthen plaster
is clay subsoil mixed with fine sand, wheat paste, and fiber.
Depending on the qualities of the clay, cracking is controlled
by adjusting one or another ingredient. Reinforcement is provided
by various binders applied after the mud is dry. Linseed oil and
blood are two of the more traditional binders, but I use mostly
waterglass (sodium silicate), an inert mineral dissolved in water
under heat and pressure. It's used for everything from stopping
leaky radiators to preserving sandstone buildings. All the pigments
are earths, mostly from very near my home. Of course, ALL pigment
is some kind of earth (including all the colors of Michelangelo's
Sistine ceiling).
DURABILITY:
The reinforced
wall pieces are water resistant, lightfast, and made to last.
They are designed for interior display but, in more protected
locations, may hold up well outdoors as well. They can be hung
as you would hang a mirror.
ADDITIONAL WORK:
In addition to
the sculpted cob courtyard wall at FireWorks, I've done two other
walls in Corvallis, one on Garfield, in the block west of King's,
on the north side of the street, and the other on NW 12th, just
south of Corvallis High School. Both are visible from the street.
SUMMER 2010 UPDATES: WORKSHOPS
and SUMMER EVENTS
YURTS! Bill Coperthwaite came out from Maine last fall and helped us frame up and shingle a beautiful little two-tier yurt. There will be workshops in May to weave willow wattle walls and put plaster on them. Photos & stories about the framing on this blog, and info about the workshops below.)
NEW WORK: Spoons: ah! Sculpture you can eat with. I bought some new tools (well, really they are old -- as in traditional), and have joined a sculptural tradition that revolves (like me) around home. I've posted a few pix and anecdotes here.
NEW OVEN TECHNIQUES: I've been experimenting w/home-made bricks, and like the results. Better ovens; lots of fun. (See "jumping bricks".)
OVEN WORKSHOPS: This year, I'm building on contract. Some clients are organizing their own "oven-raisings" with me as lead builder/instructor. In the latter case, I'll send out email when there are workshop opportunities (To get on the list, write to handprint@cmug.com. There are also a growing number of oven (and other) workshops being offered all over the country. One place to look is http://www.naturalbuildingnetwork.org).
OVEN APPRENTICESHIPS: I am open to bringing in one or two students on each oven build -- a short but intensive apprenticeship. If you're interested, write or call (preference to those who write real letters, by hand, on paper! POB 576, Blodgett, OR 97326) Projects won't start up, probably, until June or July.
DON'T BE AN ARTIST: After a lot of decades maneuvering around the limits of professionalism, and a liberating reminder about the limits of the English language, I've realized that if I want to live by principles of art and beauty, then I can't "be an Artist." More on a new site with other essays about theworkofart, (Irish pun intended) that I will be adding onto as I get them done. (excerpt in plain text below) Your feedback is welcome!
OVENS AND EFFICIENCY: I worry about people who think that mud and other masonry ovens are "efficient." Especially when they take the idea to countries where fuel is really scarce. It's a topic worth investigating in myriad ways, but it requires admitting that an earthen oven is NOT the most fuel efficient way to cook your bread. More here.
Yurt project and related workshops at Ancient Arts Center (in Alsea, Oregon).
May 1-2- Weave a Willow
Building, $50/day
This continues a project begun last October with Yurt Master William
Coperthwaite, who led the frame and roof raising of the beautiful,
two-tiered wood yurt. Now we start weaving the willow wattle
walls, so that later in May we can apply mud to weatherproof and
insulate. View our living willow fences, arches and get
ideas for your own willow structures. Lead instructor is
Margaret Mathewson; contact her at ancientartscenter.com, Margaret@peak.org
or 541-486-4311
May 29-31- Earthen plasters
for walls of all kinds, $50/day
Learn about making mud structures. Identify types of mud-
plaster for covering existing walls and buildings; sculptural
mud for shaping and decorative ornaments; natural (fireproof!)
insulating mud; mud for natural colors and paints; and cob or
adobe mud for walls, ovens hearths and entire homes. Yurt
weaving begun May 1st should be ready for mudding. Guest Instructor
is Kiko Denzer. Contact Margaret Mathewson at http://www.ancientartscenter.com,
Margaret@peak.org or 541-486-4311.
OF NOTE for those interested
in building their own economic, efficient, affordable heat source:
Earth & Fire: clean, affordable, heat,
A workshop with the Cob Cottage Co., in Coquille OR, Sept
23-30, $1,200
In Russia, Scandinavia and much of Northern Europe houses are
heated by huge upright brick stoves, often floor to ceiling, weighing
several tons. Some incorporate a bread oven, some a cooking
stove. Known as Russian Stoves, Finnish heaters etc., they
can be faced with decorative tiles (kachelofn). From a single
daily firing with wood, they provide 24 hour slow heat to the
whole house. They are clean burning and use little fuel.
In North America until now your only choices have been to pay
$10-25,000 to a specialist mason or buy a kit shipped from Finland
and try to get it right yourself. Flemming and Karen Abrahamsson,
famous for this stove work in Denmark, will come from Copenhagen
to offer an 8-day professional course, possibly the first ever
in the Western States. They will explore how owner-builders
can use European traditional geometrics with adobe and Oregon
Cob for a much cheaper version. Limit is 10 participants - so
reserve yours space early!
DON'T BE AN ARTIST (excerpt)
[Art] must have begun
as nature - not as an imitation of nature, not as a formalized
representation of it, but as the relationship between humans and
the natural world, from which we can't be separated despite our
attempts to set up a technological superstructure to destroy it.
- Lucy R. Lippard, in Art in America, 11/81
I GREW up in a home that my artist mother filled with beautiful and useful things: hooked tapestries that told stories and covered naked walls or floors; finely jointed boxes full of shells and carvings in flowing black and white beach sands that shifted like miniature dunes; knotted necklaces, clothes, bread, furniture, and tools. I drew a lot, and started carving stone at 10, working with a penknife on bits of soft soapstone. In high school, I found a piece of marble at a demolition site, learned to forge and temper old files into chisels, and carved an oversize por-trait of my own fist. One summer, I picked up a piece of granite off the beach and pecked it into a recognizable figure. My New Yorker mother took me to major museums and little galleries. I loved Michelangelo and Brancusi, but found much modern art confusing and unrelated to the world. Art seemed both expensive and common. At a gallery in our town, I saw and fell in love with a small soapstone sculpture made by an unknown Inuit. The forty dollar price tag was huge for a ten- year- old, but I saved my money and bought it. (I still have it my first and only gallery purchase.)
That year I also learned to use a potter's wheel, and started to shape wet clay into bowls, cups, and a horn I could play. A year or two later, I learned to take and develop photographs, and started to use the camera to share with others the beauties I saw in shadows, shapes, and pat-tern. I drew. With negligible training and my mother's example and encouragement, I became proficient at all this before I was fifteen.
I learned to look for beauty in clay and light and line, volume and texture I measured my results by comparison to what I saw and felt around me. Of those years, I best recall the shapes and colors I tried to copy: the feathers and form of a dead gull I found on the beach; the pat-terns of light and shadow in sand dunes and grasses that I photographed; the swelling forms of bowls and cups I made of clay; the shape and colors of fish that I caught and drew, or sculpted. It seemed important to see and to celebrate.
Outside home and a few galleries and museums, however, I saw little celebration. My mother didn't sell much of her art, and complained that the only way an artist could make a living was by teaching. And while teaching was good, the beauty it added to the world seemed small and pri-vate. I wanted beauty large, useful, and public. I wanted to work in a world where anyone and everyone could see and celebrate any number of beauties. I looked at Michelangelo's stone fig-ures and Sistine murals and loved that kings and popes had commissioned him to fill public squares and churches with beautiful figures from great stories and I loved that Italians seemed to love Michelangelo as much as I and my hockey buddies loved Gordie Howe or Wayne Gretzky (How many sports heroes names live on after 5 centuries?)
By contrast, at the rink and at school, I learned to measure myself on standardized scales: goals made, grades or wages earned, all "scored" on a simple numerical scale. None of my teachers taught beauty as a subject, nor suggested it as a goal or a measure. Even my art teachers evalu-ated us according to technical standards reducible to some graduated numerical scale. "Beauty" was a simple thing, a matter of personal preference rather than a source of common wealth or a unifying force greater than our small, human structures, our theories, or our knowledge.
My teachers had all apparently accepted without question the judgmental and reductive de-mands of a world view in which every human was a whole unto itself rather than a whole par-ticipant partially responsible for the maintenance of a much larger design. Rather than looking for the ways in which each student might express and celebrate a common beauty, they divided and sorted us like merchandise, with the "A" students on top, worthy of high esteem, high price, and high wages, and the "B," "C," "D," and "F" students all below, ready sorted to uphold nei-ther the beauty nor goodness of all, but rather the status of the few. Those pre-destined or mysteriously successful ones were deemed "to be better and brighter." The rest were actually and symbolically discounted and devalued.
I neither saw nor understood,
but I could feel that the requirement to strive against everyone
else also required denying the beauty that held us all and
that I held most dear and most wor-thy. How could I pursue (much
less know) this beauty if the pursuit required me to deny it to
others? How could I be worthy if someone else was not? While I
did well enough at school to fit into a comfortable layer of existence,
the whole thing didn't make much sense. When people asked me "what
do you want to be?" I chose "artist" but I didn't
see a clear path, a way of beauty that would make me whole in
a beautiful world.
When I got out of college, I did whatever seemed to work at the
time, and managed to escape categorization. My peers chose careers
according to their aptitudes, went to graduate school according
to their grades, got jobs and wages according to their evaluations,
married or made progress, and set about either teaching or raising
more professionals. I chose not to be not to be an artist,
nor, really, anything else. I wandered down a seemingly random
path, from art to community organizing to carpentry to bureaucracy
to writing and publishing to teaching. It was a bit confusing,
to others and myself. When my mother asked when I intended to
return to "my art," I got angry.
Now, fifty years later,
my life revolves around various arts, but if I tell people "I'm
an artist," the next question is almost invariably, "And
you make a living at it?" Then I know it will be a long time
before we can talk about art. Often I take an oblique tack, and
tell them what I've actually been doing making stuff, working
in the office, digging in the garden, or just hanging out
but this often makes normal professionals uncomfortable. They'd
rather have a recognized career category and swap credentials.
The alternative of actually talking about what they do might force
them to admit that their job bores them, or makes them feel small;
or maybe the daily details of what they love doing are too intimate
or complex. Some who love their work are humble and don't want
to claim the status of their title. (One state senator I met at
a party just said "I'm a public servant.") Maybe we're
all afraid of being misunderstood. I suspect it's a combination
of all this and more. Labels are so easy....
(more at http://www.theworkofart.org)
http://www.handprintpress.com
http://www.chelseagreen.com/blogs/kikodenzer
http://www.kikodenzer.blogspot.com/
http://www.theworkofart.org/
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