[Sca-cooks] Mud oven - repost, sort of.

Lisa Mohr gulesandor at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 25 16:23:22 PDT 2009


As to how much wood it takes to fire up an oven, that strictly depends on the size of your oven and how much mass you're trying to heat.  In the fairly large one Dame Leticia and I built, it took maybe a bushel basket full of assorted sticks and bits over a period of an hour and a half or so, longer if it had been quite a while since the last firing.

Elizabeth David mentions some of the fuels used in English ovens, leading me to believe that perhaps the rampant, invasive and nasty pollen-producing Scotch broom we have growing around here might work.  

Elisabeth

--- On Wed, 3/25/09, Stefan li Rous <StefanliRous at austin.rr.com> wrote:
From: Stefan li Rous <StefanliRous at austin.rr.com>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Mud oven - repost, sort of.
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 1:43 AM

Bear said:

<<< Dumping hot ash into the space under the oven can be a fire danger
and may
be hazardous to whoever is loading the oven.  The only ovens I've seen that
have open space underneath are Roman ovens that were set up outdoors where
using the space to protect the firewood from rain might be an advantage.
>>>

Why is dumping the hot ash into the alcove under the oven any more dangerous
than dumping it somewhere else? Where somewhere else? What do you carry these
live coals in, when moving them to this somewhere else? Now, we think metal
shovel. But back then shovels tended to be of wood. But perhaps they
wouldn't scorch too badly. But scrapping out the coals, letting them fall to
the ground and then scrapping them into the hole doesn't sound too bad.

I don't remember these alcoves as being very big. Would they be big enough
to store enough wood to heat an oven hot enough to be of use? Perhaps just to
hold enough wood to start a fire to then dry out more wood, but that seems like
a convoluted solution.

I think some folks here have fired up and used mass ovens. How much wood did it
take to heat up the oven sufficiently?

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
   Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****


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