My wood-fired oven in the garden - a wish comes true!

With the new house, I have finally become the proud owner of a wood-fired oven in the garden. I had dreamed of this for so long! Baking your own bread, and then really in a baking oven that was previously heated with wood.

The implementation took place as part of the garden design, although the landscaper did not do this. My husband built the foundation, and then a stove fitter installed the oven.

The built foundation:


Now plastered:


Then brick lintels were added:


And finally the installed oven (it was a kit from Kandern Feuerfest):

Granite slabs were placed on top, and on the work surface next to the oven, we have also now laid a granite slab that we had cut to size for this purpose.

After a few days, the oven was seasoned. That meant: starting slowly and with little fuel until you can use the full amount of wood and the oven becomes operational, so to speak. This is a process that takes a few days:


And finally, we could use the oven for the first time! Since I didn’t have any sourdough yet, it was a bread with ready-made sourdough (which can no longer be used as a leavening agent, but only provides flavor) and a ciabatta:


We were already very impressed. The residual heat can always be used for braised dishes of all kinds:


By now we are pros. Whether venison leg, layered meat, rabbit, or goulash. We always put something in the oven after baking bread, and without any further effort, we have wonderfully tender meat dishes in a few hours or overnight.

Of course, you need to upgrade:

Bread peel and ember rake with a brush to clean the baking chamber after heating. It was clear to us that we needed something like this.

The bread looks good. Do you make sourdough bread?

What really caught us off guard, though: with my Kitchen Aid, we don’t really get very far when it comes to baking bread. It’s actually quite a sturdy kitchen machine, but the max dough quantity for this machine is 1kg – that’s barely enough for one loaf. But you don’t heat up an oven just for one loaf; it should be worth it, and then both the Kitchen Aid and the baker reach their performance limits.
The Kitchen Aid is allowed to run for a maximum of 10 minutes at a time – and that’s exactly what you need for one loaf. If you want to bake 5 or more loaves, the little machine really struggles. And so does the baker. That means the dough for each loaf has to be made individually.
Quite a lot of effort. Hardly acceptable in terms of time.

So we looked around for a dough kneading machine (DKM). At first, I was very optimistic. In times of corona-related pizzeria closures, it should be possible to find a used DKM! Well, sure. But not necessarily what you want. Eventually it was clear: the dough bowl should be removable so that you can work with two, making two types of bread without much effort.
That excludes most pizzeria machines right away. There, the bowl is fixed.
Then the bowl should be big enough so the dough can stay in it while rising. For 5-6kg of dough, you need at least a machine for 10-12kg of dough.
In the end, only the Häussler DKM remained, either with a capacity for 14 or 18kg of dough. The price difference was not significant, so the big one it was! The one with two bowls and the appropriate cover hood, and then baking can begin!

We were very lucky to find a used machine that exactly met our requirements. These machines are extremely price-stable, so my new treasure is already of legal age – that is, 18 years old. But it still looks almost brand new:
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The picture above was the machine’s debut last weekend. To test it, we brought 10kg of flour (the specified maximum amount) and kneaded it with water there.
The machine ran, and we went home with it and a full dough bowl that contained only 9kg of flour kneaded with water – but even that was a lot!
Somehow I couldn’t just throw away the lump of flour, so I made yeast dough out of it. I pinched off some for fresh Sunday rolls, Bohemian dumplings for dinner, and the rest became sweet yeast dough. You can see the result above. In the end, that turned into about 15kg of yeast dough, and I baked like crazy (in the normal oven; there was no time left to heat up the wood-fired oven).
One tray of crumb cake and about 150 yeast cinnamon rolls – then I gave up, and the rest was frozen in portions. We probably already have yeast dough in stock for the whole extended family for the next two years...

And then, of course, bread finally had to be baked with it. A bread-baking day requires a day’s lead time. By now, I am also the proud owner of various self-cultivated sourdough strains (my husband always teases me: well, what are your pets up to?), and such a sourdough bread needs to be prepared. So I did the prep work on Monday and then had the big baking day yesterday!
This time it was to be: pumpkin crust and a rye bread with three-stage fermentation (which makes it especially digestible).

Finally, the new machine was used properly!

There’s quite a difference between having to make the dough for each loaf individually or simply making 5kg of dough all at once! It’s so much faster and a breeze for the machine. My poor little Kitchen Aid would have given out wheezing.

During the final proofing in the proofing basket (or, lacking a proofing basket, in various bowls):
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Shortly before loading into the oven:
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Finally, the oven is full!
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And after an hour, the breads are done:
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Now the oven just has to be plastered at some point and then it will be finished.

Pizza is of course also possible, but you need higher temperatures for that than for baking bread and you keep the embers inside the oven chamber as well. My brother is the big pizza baker, and I will provide pictures from our next inner-family pizza session!

Great, that is still pending for me as project 73.

Musketeer: if possible, only with sourdough - I like that much more.

Although yesterday with the pumpkin crust there were 20g of yeast in it - for 4kg of dough.

Cool but that would be way too much effort for me ... I'd rather go to the baker.

But I want to as a big pizza fan.