Wood Fired Cob Oven Adventures, Part Four: Trials, Tribulations and Baked Goods

If there's one bit of advice I'd give to any new oven builder, I'd suggest you give yourself enough time.  If you've got a desired deadline, like we did, do your due diligence to meet it without rushing.  I think that's probably the biggest lesson we learned in our oven building adventures.  

Ideally you'd like to wait about 24 hours before you do this, but we were on a deadline so we didn't.  We committed to a personal and slightly public date for our first pizza party, and we were already behind. So John took his chances and did what he needed to. To start empyting the oven,  you cut the door in the one side without the bricks and literally allow the sand to pour out.  You do need to help it along, but that's the idea.

From what we can tell, one of our cob layers in the top of the oven had more moisture than it should have, so it remoistened the whole thing.  Between that, a humid night and rushing the process, we lost some of the cob as we emptied the sand out.  John immediately responded by lighting a small fire to dry it out.

And here are a few shots of the small fire, to dry out the inside.  It seemed to work as the thing didn't collapse as he expected.  I honestly thought it had collapsed with how John said he "ruined it" but it really seems he had a close call.

We knew it needed some more cob but this was physical proof.  As cob dries, it often cracks.  At first, it's common to have to add more cob to smooth things out.  Eventually, it stops cracking and you have a super strong, super dry structure. 

As time went on, John had a few more fires, progressing in size do try it out.  No more cob fell down, although some sand did. Right into the brownies.  We decided to test out the oven with a batch of brownies, as that's what I had the materials for. 

They were tasty but studded with sand.  @modprobe didn't mind, as he ate most of them. We resolved to cob it up more, sweep out the inside and do another test the next day.  This time with pizza.

I can't say these specific pictures are from those first pizzas, but they are MY pizzas in our new cob oven.  Occasionally you'd find a grain of sand here and there, as the top of the oven dries and adjusts, but nothing like that first batch of brownies.  I'm pretty sure I also attempted a larger batch the second day with PERFECT results.  I know there was a second batch, I'm just not sure when.

At this point, we've made:

Chicken Pot Pie

Apple Pie (twice?)

Brownies, sin (without) sand

Cinnamon rolls

Pizza, LOTS OF PIZZA

Roasted Garlic for pizza

It's a two step baking process, in which we remove it from the pan and spin it around halfway through baking. For stuff other than pizza; we still spin it, we just leave it in the pan.

This is one of our better looking pizzas, with the view to add to it all. I want to say, I've probably got the best pizza oven view in Acapulco at the very least. This oven building process has been a humbling, but really positive experience.  We learned lessons in patience and planning, which we'll use to our advantage for our next build. 

The owners of the house don't know it yet, but there's now a permanent cob oven on the property.  We were given license to do as we pleased and this falls within those means.  All things considered, I really don't expect them to mind. Wood stoves and ovens are common in Mexico, or they used to be anyway.

We had an extra pizza that we could have saved to reheat, but instead I walked it down (it was John's good idea) to our local miscelanea friend, Philip.  I told him I brought him pizza and he told me he couldn't afford it. I laughed and told him it was free and he didn't believe me. 

I had to put it onto his property and say "GRATIS!" to get him to register what was going on.  He looked down and asked me where it came from.  As a long time Acapulco resident, he knew that pizza like mine did not exist in Acapulco.  When I told him I made it, he called his wife, who got really excited.  

They enjoyed it so much that the next time I saw them they gave me tamales and invited me into their home, which was modest but awesome.  Giving them that pizza was worth every bit, I'm happy they enjoyed it.  

Stay tuned, as we share more stories, both old and new.  I'm doing my best to get caught up on older posts as we've got lots of new photos already from our new camera to share.  Life is busy, especially with puppies so I do my best to share as often as I can.

Thanks for reading and supporting, and thanks to John, @modprobe and Paul for building me my oven!