Cooking with a Cob Oven

At a CoHo potluck, the topic of cob ovens came up and a southtown neighbor invited CoHoots over to see their cob oven in action.

Some CoHoots learned how to start a fire…

01_Startingfire

…while other CoHoots were busy rolling dough for pizza crusts (pizza is a favorite item to cook in a cob oven).

02_PizzaDough The fire heated up the interior oven.  The exterior cob walls were cool to the touch.

03_FireBlazingThree 6″ pizzas were cooked one at a time and moved in/out with a regular pizza peel.

04_CookingPizza

A circle of leftover dough was baked to make pita bread.  The dough puffed up beautifully in just a few minutes.  Watching it grow rapidly was very exciting!

05_PitaBreadThen it was on to the next phase of our culinary adventure–baking bread in the cob oven.  The fire was stoked up and a “door” was placed over the entrance to build up the temperature.

06_DoorNext step–the fire was emptied into a bucket and the oven was wiped out with a stick and rag so the baking items could be placed directly on the oven floor.

07_EmptyingFireThen it was time to pop in the items to be baked and replace the door.  About 45 minutes later, CoHoots and our hosts enjoyed corn, bread baked in a pan and round hearth bread.  Mmmmmmmmm good!

08_BreadAndCorn

One challenging part–it wasn’t easy to “peek” to see how the bread was baking….

Posted in Community, Food and tagged .