Earth Oven Building Weekend

A just-finished earth oven

Join Loaf for this special weekend course to learn how to build a wood-fired earth oven for your own back garden. At Loaf we use our earth oven to teach breadmaking, bake bread for our community, run pop-up pizza events and cook all manner of lovely dishes in. It’s amazing what you can get out of such an elemental cooking tool made of just mud, sand, straw and water!

The course is very hands-on: through building an oven from scratch over the weekend you’ll learn how to apply the skills to building your own earth oven at home. Over the course of the weekend we’ll be building the earth oven in the back garden of Phil and Claire Bennett in Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham.

We’ll start by looking at choosing a suitable mud (please bring a soil sample from your back garden if you wish), marking out the oven floor, and building a sand template, before getting stuck into puddling together our four main materials to start forming the ovens shape. By the end of the weekend we will have put on three layers of cob, decorated the oven, cut out the door and begun to scoop out the sand template to reveal the oven cavity. We’ll also cover how to cook in and maintain your oven, as well as handing out instruction sheets (though bring a pad and a camera aswell!). Top notch grub will be provided for lunch and snacks on both days as well as excellent beer (Phil is a national award-winning master brewer!) and other drinks.

Our first course took place on the 16th and 17th of July from 9.30am-4pm on both days and costs £135 per person. There’s photos and a short report of the weekend available here. Email cookeryschool@loafonline.co.uk to register your interest in future courses.