Bread in a Wood-Fired Oven

I've been baking bread regularly for more than 15 years. For the past 12 of those years, I've been using the same yeast culture -- originally taken from a bottle of Tall Ship Pale Ale. (The Tall Ship Ale Company is another story -- way outside the scope of this blog. References to this business that I was involved in can still be found on the web -- the fossilized remains of a great but doomed brewery... Here's one.) But until coming to Portugal one of the things I'd never done, but always wanted to, was bake bread in a wood-fired oven. Well, here, every other house has a bread oven, so...

Actually, I haven't been able to take advantage of all these ovens that much. The weekend before last I had my second real experience with one, at our near-ish neighbours' house. It didn't work out perfectly -- first it was pouring with rain and second we didn't manage to control the heat very well -- but at very least it can be considered a learning experience.

It was a big oven. You could probably bake 20-30 loaves at once with a bit of organization. Of course, we didn't want to do anything like this number -- more like eight -- so they were a bit lost in such a huge structure.

Here's the oven itself. Stone portal. Brick and clay dome. Steel plate door!

Getting such a large oven hot enough requires quite a lot of wood. One of our problems is that we probably did not heat the structure up enough; ovens like this are known as retained-heat ovens because the baking is done after removing the fire; the bread cooks with the heat retained in the walls of the oven, which is radiated back into the dome. In fact, because we wanted to bake pizza after the bread (it would be more normal to do the pizza first, as it likes higher temperatures) we didn't rake out the fire, but left the embers burning around the edge of the oven floor. This caused too much direct heat on one side of the bread, which burnt slightly.

Now one of my books on bread ovens notes that, when the oven is at the right temperature, the inside of the dome turns from sooty black to white. We got this part right; at a certain point, we looked inside and sure enough the roof was white.

That's me, placing bread into the oven. One problem we had was that the floor of the oven has worn so much that bread (and especially pizza) doesn't slide nicely over it. Also, it was impossible to swab the ash out from all the cracks and crannies on the floor -- the result being rather ashy pizza. But somehow that just added to the experience!

Here's the bread baking in the oven. I've turned it once, so you can see the burned crust. This was because of the embers left burning in the back and to the sides of the chamber.

We'll try again sometime. And also, I hope, move forward with plans to build an oven (or two) on our land. I'd like to try a stone/brick oven of this type as well as an earth (clay) one. But that's for the future...