Building a Wood-fired Oven for Bread and Pizza

Today's bread lacks the taste of former times - partly due to the flour and the short time taken in making and maturing the dough, but mainly because of the oven. Bread is cooked in hot air, or steamed to death; it never has the chance to develop the crackling deep crust, or capture that indefinable aroma of wheat that comes from making bread slowly and baking it in brick. In the ancient world, ovens were invented solely for baking bread, and the design, materials and methods of firing of ovens still working in the Greek countryside - and those which stand ruined in village squares in the Dordogne - are essentially the same as those that baked bread for Julius Caesar. Written with the novice builder in mind, this book describes the stages of construction of a brick oven for the garden, with no fire hazards, no major structural problems and no planning difficulties. Detailed plans and illustrations are provided. Further chapters describe how to fire and run such ovens, and give recipes for basic breads and pizzas, and there is an additional section on restoring and running old ovens, thousands of which which survive in farmhouses across Britain.