I would help build a wood-fired backyard clay oven all over again, and you should try it too, if only because mixing clay, sand, and water with your feet feels sooooo good. It gets all in between your toes, creeps up your legs, and even though you get covered in the mixture, it feels somehow cleaner than mud. It’s a clean kind of dirty.
And a productive one, too. The reason you’re mixing three parts sand with one part clay and lots of water is well worth the workout. Wood-fired clay ovens, like the one recently erected in the South Portland backyard of Nate Chasse and Dori Hart, epitomize the do-it-yourself, slow-food, hand-crafted movement. Plus, they produce delicious breads, pizzas, and baked goods. Chasse knows this; at his old-fashioned oven-build on Sunday, he said the oven represented a lifestyle change more than a handyman’s weekend project.
“Building and baking in an oven made out of our Earth’s materials connects me to the Earth, in turn creating a deeper connection to the food I am baking to share with family and friends,” he says.
Chasse became interesting in constructing the backyard oven after attending last year’s (first-ever) Kneading Conference, in Skowhegan, which brought together bakers, oven-builders, flour millers, and local slow-foodies from Maine and beyond. It was there that he met Kiko Denzer, whose book, Build Your Own Earth Oven, became Chasse’s guide for this project. He will also attend the second annual Kneading Conference this weekend, in Skowhegan, which was funded in part by a $7500 grant from the Western Mountains Fund of the Maine Community Foundation. This year’s incarnation promises to be even more inspiring, with speakers and presentations covering a comprehensive range of topics.
“The goal of the conference is to celebrate and inspire the idea of locally growing and milling grain for bread baked in wood-fired ovens” to “foster ecological and community sustainability,” according to the organizers at Heart of Maine Resource Conservation and Development.
Not to mention tasty food. “You will be able to see our smoke signals from the peninsula,” Hart writes in an email of their soon-to-be-complete oven. “And know that there is yummy bread or pizza being baked at our house.”
On the Web
For more information on the Kneading Conference, visit heartofmaine.org/kneading.
For more about the South Portland oven, email LittleTigerCo@gmail.com.
