Cob Ovens Overview
“Earth turns to gold in the hands of the wise.” – umi
Imagine moving your baking projects outdoors. Imagine constructing your own oven out of natural materials in the same way people have done so for centuries. Imagine increasing your level of self-sufficiency by decreasing your use of non-renewable resources. Imagine a project that your family, group of friends, or neighborhood can enjoy in a fun, productive, messy, and earthy way that adults and kids alike will love and appreciate!
This is the beauty of Cob Ovens.
Imagine moving your baking projects outdoors. Imagine constructing your own oven out of natural materials in the same way people have done so for centuries. Imagine increasing your level of self-sufficiency by decreasing your use of non-renewable resources. Imagine a project that your family, group of friends, or neighborhood can enjoy in a fun, productive, messy, and earthy way that adults and kids alike will love and appreciate!
This is the beauty of Cob Ovens.
Benefits of Cob Ovens
For the Earth
For the Community
- Natural Materials: Clay, sand and straw are local and require little or no fossil fuels to acquire.
- Reducing our Impact on the Earth: The entire oven will return back into the earth once you’ve moved on, eliminating the footprint of non-biodegradable materials such as concrete or plastic.
- Efficiency: With the help of the rocket stove, the wood required is minimalized and the fire actually gets so hot that is will burn away most of the gases. Therefore emitting little to no smoke, and less CO2.
For the Community
- Bringing People Together: --Clay oven builds and their use are great ways to bring neighbours, friends, or family together for a meaningful, productive, and tasty purpose.
- Food Awareness: Our ovens go far beyond bread and pizza. Because of this unique rocket stove design and metal cooking surface, it’s possible that any kind of dish can be baked, grilled, or boiled in the oven!
- Earth Awareness: The Earth provides for us. Connecting with Earth and learning how to make use of what it provides is essential to our survival and place on this planet.
Construction Benefits
- Cost of materials is low or possibly free.
- Although it’s labour intensive, anyone can do it at their own pace and there’s a quick learning curve once you get your hands dirty.
- It’s structurally very strong.
- Cob is the perfect medium for sculpting. You really have endless artistic possibilities!
- Being in contact with the Earth is very rejuvenating and detoxifying!
- You can apply this skill to more building in the future, and even go as far as creating your dream house that you can build yourself!
- W.E. Cob is here to help, but if you like, any problems will be completely resolvable by you!
- It’s fun, good for your health, and will provide you with a wonderful sense of accomplishment and empowerment!
- If you don’t believe us, try it :)
Construction Challenges
- It can be a lot of hard work mixing and building, but with support it becomes fulfilling work and healthy exercise!
- Test of patience. It takes 12-24 hours for a group of 4-6 people to build, with about a week drying time between layers on larger ovens. Also, we must wait 2-4 weeks before the first big firing to ensure that it has dried properly.
- It’s big! The walls are 20-25cm thick! So take the inside diameter that you want and add 40-50cm for the total exterior diameter of the oven.
- Cracks! If the oven’s improperly built or the mix was wrong, the oven will crack and have to be repaired. However, this is very easy to do and an essential skill to learn. Nothing lasts forever, but with the right knowledge and skills, you'll never need to buy another oven.
Potentials of a Cob Oven
1. Baking: Pizzas baked crispy in 2 minutes. Bread in 30 minutes plus a 30 minute pre-heat. The best dozen-egg frittata ever in 45 minutes. The most succulent chicken you’ve ever had in an hour or huge turkey in 6 hours. Quesadillas in a few minutes. The surface even gets hot enough (+600C) to cook naan bread! What else will you try?
2.Heated bench – by basically directing the excess heat, we can warm your bottoms as you enjoy your wintertime pizza party on a heated cob bench.
3.Hot Tub or water heater– All we have to do is coil some copper pipe within the walls of the oven, and as we cook our food warm water exits the pipe into a hot tub or maybe an outdoor sink! Providing a constant supply of heated water as long as you keep the fire going or the walls are still warm.
4.Landscape Feature – Imagine how a hand-made and functional ‘sculpture’ would look somewhere in your yard. Whether you like it simple or out of this world, anything is possible and the oven is the perfect centerpiece for the space you create.
ther oven.
2.Heated bench – by basically directing the excess heat, we can warm your bottoms as you enjoy your wintertime pizza party on a heated cob bench.
3.Hot Tub or water heater– All we have to do is coil some copper pipe within the walls of the oven, and as we cook our food warm water exits the pipe into a hot tub or maybe an outdoor sink! Providing a constant supply of heated water as long as you keep the fire going or the walls are still warm.
4.Landscape Feature – Imagine how a hand-made and functional ‘sculpture’ would look somewhere in your yard. Whether you like it simple or out of this world, anything is possible and the oven is the perfect centerpiece for the space you create.
ther oven.