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 August bank holiday weekend we’ll be building the earth oven in a back garden in Stirchley, south 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 as well!). Top notch grub will be provided for lunch and snacks on both days as well as drinks throughout the day.
Places cost £135 for the weekend and the next course will be running on the 15th and 16th June 2013. Email us at cookeryschool@loafonline.co.uk if you would like to be notified of new course dates.
Our first course took place in July 2011. There’s photos and a short report of the weekend available here.






please reserve me a place on the bread oven course
thankyou
Shirley
I would be really interested in this course but would need to know proposed dates in order to know if I could book it. Sounds great.
I would like to book this weekend for my husbands birthday present. Is it definatly going ahead on the 16th / 17th July. How can I book?
Please let me know dates for classes building an earth oven.