[Sca-cooks] Traveling pizza ovens

[Terry Decker]

Maria Martinez fired her pots in a fire pit.  I'm sure that it lost more 
heat than a kiln, but it did the job.

The question is not the efficiency, but the purpose.  You can bake bread on 
a hot rock or in a pit lined with hot rocks.  You can't bake much bread, but 
it works for an individual or small group on the move.  Stack ovens aren't 
efficient for large scale baking, but they can be built out of scrap 
material, assembled and disassembled quickly and moved fairly easily.  In 
this kind of baking, you are not concerned with the heat that escapes, but 
the heat that is retained in the brick mass and radiated back into the oven 
chamber.  The clay does act as a seal and an insulator and makes the oven 
more efficient, but makes it harder to disassemble and move.

Bear

> I'm sure someone can correct me if I'm wrong as I have only a conceptual 
> knowledge of bread ovens. But I would think using clay would be better for 
> using as the heat would probably seep from the oven more without the clay. 
> Also wouldn't the bricks be hotter on the outside without the clay 
> insulation?  Not sure.
>
> I've built kilns, but not bread ovens.
>
> --Mercy