The Wood-Fired Blog

But Wait. There’s More.

Sep 12, 2012Posted by Forno Bravo

If you order now, we will also include this nice loaf of banana bread. haha.

This posting is about the remarkable heat retention that I am getting with my Strada60 oven, and how little wood it takes to fire the oven. It’s surprising even me.

Today I build a typical two-log fire and baked two baguettes and the loaf of toasting bread that I was plotting out earlier today. But then, we had a bunch of bananas that were going over-ripe, so I made a last minute decision to make banana bread! And the oven easily had enough heat to keep baking. I lit the fire at 3 PM, and it was still around 400F at 7:30 PM for the second bake. Wahoo!

My experience with brick ovens goes back to the first Bread Builders brick oven I built in my backyard in Healdsburg. Alan Scott even came by and helped me finish it. The oven dome had full-size firebricks on their edge and 4-5″ of calcium aluminate concrete poured around the dome. Doing some napkin math, that means that my oven dome was 9 1/2″ thick; 5-6 times thicker than my Strada oven. To this day, I still chuckle about that oven — and all the wood it took to fire it up, and poorly suited it was to backyard baking. It would be barely warm after burning two pieces of wood. A commercial bakery, maybe. But a backyard oven?

Sometimes customers (or potential customers) will ask me if our smaller ovens (the Primavera, Andiamo and Strada) have enough thermal mass for serious baking and roasting. And the answer is a hearty YES!

Archives

Have any questions?