Broke Ground! And Questions. . .

[m1mckinlay]

--(Lack of) Progress Update--

For those of you contemplating or beginning an oven build, be warned: Once the oven becomes operational, ALL construction and finish work on it stops! My oven doesn't have a landing, roof tiles, finish materials, or anything else to make it look pretty - and I haven't even thought about it! - but I've spent just as much time "working on it" as before. My grinder, drill and work gloves have been replaced with pizza peels, IR thermometers and oven mitts. We fire it up 2-3 times per week.

The food is incredible.

I need to get back on the stick and finish it. I'll post more pics once I get back in gear.

Back to the food. . . we let our kids choose their meal of choice at birthday time, and last week my six year-old son insisted on WFO pizza for his birthday meal even though we had fired the oven two days earlier and had leftover pizza the day before! He can't get enough of it. Our favorite is the margherita with tomatoes, lots of basil, olive oil and fresh mozzarella.

Other non-pizza hits have been:

-Chicken piccatia
-Roasted potatoes
-Roasted broccoli
-Roast beef
-Biscotti
-Foccacia
-Puffed oven pancakes
-S'mores dessert pizza (phenomenal, by the way)

I've told my wife that anything her oven can do, mine can do better. But she reminds me that hers looks prettier. For now, she's right.

[GianniFocaccia]

Ask your beautiful wife if her oven can bake 18 loaves of bread in one batch!

[m1mckinlay]

Well, my efforts on the oven continue to focus on cooking stuff, which means I (still) haven't made much progress finishing the build. My wife convinced me I better get a roof on before the weather turns nasty. Yeah, she's very wise. I'm also wise and follow her advice. So, I have a roof on it now as the pics below show. I also painted the gabled structure, which was a temporary skin aimed at making it look somewhat presentable to the 20 people we hosted for Thanksgiving. More on that later. Otherwise, much still needs to be done.

I found some slate tile in a boneyard at one of the local roofing supply stores and put that up, which turned out to be a cheaper and better looking option than asphalt shingles. I still need to put the eve riser trim on, and will then be done with the roof.

I still need to brick the arch and lay the counter in the next couple weeks, and will then focus on the finish work on the base (river rock), gabled house (stucco) and chimney. That stuff will happen in the spring.

Onto Thanksgiving. We hosted 20 people from out of town (different story) and cooked two turkey breasts in the oven along with green beans and appetizers. I've never cooked a turkey before - and not just in the WFO - so this was unchartered territory. I had told our guests plan B was to move dinner to the China Buffet in case the turkey in the WFO thing didn't turn out. They thought I was kidding.

Anyways, I brined the turkey for 18 hours in an apple cider-based brine and then cooked the breasts on a bed of vegetables in the oven. The oven floor was 700 degrees when it was time to go in, so I mopped the floor to cool it down and then placed the turkeys in pans on baking sheets to insulate the pan a little bit from the heat of the floor. I covered the turkeys with foil, kept a small fire going during cooking and kept the door off. I took off the foil for the last 15 mins and stoked up the fire to brown them.

Now, I'm not a turkey guy, and I don't normally gloat, but allow me to say that this turkey was the best I have tasted. It was incredibly tender, had a great crust and the turkey went faster than the tri-tips we had grilled, which is the family-favorite tried-and-true recipe.

The next day we used the residual heat for puffed oven pancakes, followed by a massive pizza party that night, followed by six loaves of biscotti. It was an awesome Thanksgiving and the oven took center stage. It was a lot of fun.

If only it was finished. . .