Latest firing technique.

I talked to Ron Parks today, a patient of mine and a historian by profession. He said his son-in-law has build an outdoor oven and had questions about what kind of wood I use and a few other questions. After a year of working with the oven, getting the oven hot is the easy part. I find the timing of attaining the proper over temperature the toughest to do.

Here's the latest sequence of firing up the oven:
1. 4 PM start the fire in the oven. I use mostly hedge (Osage Orange). I load up almost the entire oven with a layer of wood, but I stack it with small sticks near the door to start the fire.
2. Once the fire starts and a few coals have formed, I push some of the coals back into the oven and load some more wood into the oven. I'll do this every 30-60 minutes, sometimes adding wood, sometimes just moving coals around. The idea is to get some coals to all corners of the oven. It takes around 4-8 hours to accomplish this. You know you are getting the oven hot when the soot burns off the walls of the oven and there are no more black splotches on the side. If one area is still black, scoot some coals into that area.
3. I usually try to put some big diameter pieces of wood (6-8") in late at night so I won't have to get up frequently at night to load up the oven. Even then I have to get up twice during the night, usually 0230 and 0500.
4. I try to get the dome temperature as close to 500 degrees as I can. If it is the morning of baking day and it's only up to 450, I settle for that. I then close the door of then oven, letting the remaining coals burn out. To get the dome to 500, the hearth is usually up to 900, which is way too hot to use. It takes about 6-8 hours for the oven to cool down. To bake bread, the hearth temperature needs to be below 500 degrees. (525 is OK if using bread without oils).
5. By late afternoon, I'm usually ready to bake. Most loaves finish in about 25-35 minutes.