From Library Journal
Denzer, an artist and builder, creates beautiful wood-fired ovens using the most widely available building material: dirt. Some earth ovens are plain while others are formed into the shape of animals or human faces. Denzer offers an explanation of basic concepts such as material selection, oven location, and design and then guides readers through the construction of their own oven. Earth ovens could be produced most anywhere using Denzer's instructions; he even shows how to build a weatherproof roof. A sourdough bread recipe is included. Appealing to a diverse audience of bakers, outdoor cooks, traditional crafts persons, and perhaps even homeschoolers looking for a project, this title should be part of most public library collections. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Permaculture Activist, August, 2004
Brief, brisk, artful, and well-written....explains the principles of breadmaking with a few deft strokes.... Graceful, well-detailed, and empowering throughout.

www.walnutbooks.com, April 2003
...inspired creativity combined with traditional wisdom....Get a copy and build yourself an earth bread oven. It's that simple.

Petit Propos Culinaires, #70, August 2002
...enjoyable, down-to-earth and sensible....his instructions are clear as rainwater, his advice...intelligent and sound....

www.williamrubel.com
Creative. Innovative. Brilliant. This is the definitive book on how to build an adobe oven. ...clear and precise instructions...

Book Description
Build Your Own Earth Oven is a fully-illustrated handbook for making a simple, wood-fired, masonry-style oven. It provides clear, step-by-step instructions for building and firing the oven, as well as complete directions for making sourdough bread in the best (and simplest) artisan tradition. Earth ovens are as simple as a southwestern horno or European bee-hive oven and every bit as effective as a fancy brick hearth or modern, steam-injected commercial oven. The dense, three-to-twelve inch thick earthen walls store the heat of the fire; after the hot coals are removed, the hot walls radiate a steady, intense heat for hours. The resulting steamy environment is essential for the crisp, flavorful crusts of true hearth loaves, and you can easily build it for less than the price of a couple of fancy dough-rising baskets! If you like to cook outdoors, an earth oven can also transform fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs into delicious pies, pizzas, and other creations (one of my favorites is fresh vegetables, herbs, and potatoes drizzled with olive oil). Pizza cooks to perfection in three minutes, and you can even use the residual heat to dry your surplus garden produce, and incubate your home-made yogurt! Building with earth is safe, easy, inexpensive, and extraordinarily effective. Good building soil is usually right under your feet! Many will find it in their back yards. Use it plain, or mixed with sand and straw. Build the simplest oven in a day! Adding a roof and foundation makes it permanent. The simple, round shape makes a beautiful garden sculpture, or can be sculpted into a fire-breathing dragon! It is a project that appeals to bakers, builders, and beginners of all kinds: The serious or aspiring baker who wants the best lo-cost oven for their bread; Gardeners and outdoor cooks who want a centerpiece for a beautiful outdoor kitchen; People interested in creative uses of low-cost materials and simple technologies; and Teachers who want a multi-faceted, experiential learning experience for their students (the book has been successful with everyone from third-graders to adults). Illustrated by the author with over a hundred drawings and photos, it includes color pictures of sculpted ovens and their builders, as well as further references on food, baking, and building.

About the Author
Kiko Denzer is an artist, writer, builder, and baker who has spent the last five or six years working primarily with earth.

Excerpted from Build Your Own Earth Oven : A Low-Cost, Wood-Fired Mud Oven; Simple Sourdough Bread; Perfect Loaves by Kiko Denzer. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION Why a wood-fired, earthen oven? Modern cookbooks make bread-baking seem complicated and difficult — which it is not. Building and baking in a wood-fired earthen oven restores the simplicity of bread by returning you to essentials: earth, water, air, and fire. Plants transform the energy of the sun into woody material, fire transforms wood into energy, and the massive walls of an earthen oven absorb and concentrate that energy as heat. After a couple of hours, the oven is hot enough that you can remove the fire and bake bread. The hot, dense mud radiates its stored heat at a steady rate (like the sun!) Radiant heat is fundamental to our very existence — from it we have photosynthesis and weather, food and shelter, and sunny days on the beach, not to mention wheat and bread. The architect Christopher Alexander says that humans have a biologically built-in human preference for radiant heat — his answer to why people prefer an open fireplace to an open heating vent. Perhaps that’s another reason why bread is better baked in a wood-fired oven…. Radiation is one of three ways that heat can be transferred from oven to bread: the other two are convection and conduction. Convection is the reason why warm air rises — heated air molecules move faster — the faster they move, the farther apart they get and the fewer of them there are in a given amount of space. Fewer molecules have less weight, making hot air lighter than cold air; thus, hot air rises. Convection works in any gas or liquid, but it doesn’t work in solid materials, like brick or metal. So heat doesn’t always rise, or at least, not exclusively. In a solid material, heat moves in all directions, by a method called conduction. Conduction is how a hot frying pan cooks an egg — direct contact with hot metal transfers heat very quickly to the egg, which cooks much faster than it would if it was only in contact with hot air. Modern ovens depend primarily on convection, so it’s not the oven that does the cooking; instead, the air carries the heat to your bread, and the bread cooks. Even if a modern oven has no hot or cold spots, baking more than two loaves requires careful arrangement so the air can carry equal amounts of heat to every loaf. Fancy, so-called "convection" ovens try to improve the situation with a fan that hurries the hot air around. Special baking pans or stones can help improve your bread, but they are poor substitutes for the original oven, which was made of earth. An earthen oven bakes your bread using all three kinds of heat transfer: radiant heat from the hot walls; conducted heat from hot bricks through the bottom of the loaf, and convected heat from hot, steamy air swirling inside the sealed oven. With all this heat from every direction, many loaves cook as easily as one. In addition, the different kinds of heat working together improve what is called "oven spring" — the irregular air holes and high loaf that happen when a vigorous batch of yeasty dough gives a final surge of activity in response to a hot floor and hot, steamy air. In addition, superheated steam caramelizes the sugars in the outside layer of dough, producing a lovely, crisp, substantial crust. Building and baking with a wood-fired earthen oven not only makes wonderful bread, it can also teach you things you’ll never learn with a modern oven, bread machine, or book. Instead of turning switches, you will come to know earth, air, fire and water, and you will come to know the life they give to grain and yeast and bread, as well as the life they give to us. Books can explain why, but the best way to really understand is to do it yourself. "You got to go there to know there." Earthen Building, or what is "cob," anyway? Earth is the most common, and perhaps the most versatile building material on the planet. Mixed with sand and straw, a clay subsoil will become very hard and durable; indeed, it was the first, natural "concrete." In the Americas, this material is called "adobe," from an Arabic word, al-toba, meaning "the brick." Invading Moors brought the word to Spain from North Africa, where the ancient tradition of mud building continues today. In Britain, the continuing tradition of earthen building is called cob, from an old English word meaning "lump." The Brits skipped the step of forming bricks, and made their walls by packing wet blobs of mud on top of each other, letting them dry, and carving them smooth. Five-hundred-year-old cob houses are common in Devon, England, where they are recognized on historic registers, and command high prices when sold. Protected by roof and foundation from direct rain and snow, earthen buildings hold up very well, even in damp, windy Devon. I built a mud studio in the temperate rainforest of the Oregon coast range, and it is warmer and drier than my wooden cabin — not to mention that it’s impervious to fire, and the bugs that eat wood can’t stomach it. Building a mud oven is like building a mud house, on a smaller scale. The dome shape is basic in nature, common to beehives, bird’s nests, caves, cliff dwellings, igloos, huts, and the Houston Astrodome — strong, self-supporting, easy to build and heat.

FROM THE CRITICS

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