Adam Bakes

Adam declared today to be his oven-baking day. He started early, heating it up. At its maximum temp, it was about 700 degrees.

He keeps a bucket of water under his oven, and immerses his tools in it regularly so they won't burn when he uses them in the oven.

He finally came up with a door solution.  This is actually a panel door from his tool box.  The handle makes it easy to use (with an oven mitt), and metal holds the heat in the oven, and since it isn't wood, it doesn't burn up like earlier doors.

I'm having a LOT of trouble with the pics on this post! All that to say, that clay owl up there is Julia's of course. When Adam heats up his oven, she digs up some clay and figures out what she wants to make-and-bake. When Adam was ready to empty the fire, wood, and ashes from his oven, he just shoveled them over into the fire pit. I ripped up my tired tomato plants from the patio, and burned them in it.

Adam decided to make two kinds of bread:  country loaf and ciabatta, an Italian bread that is extremely moist as a dough. You see here how sticky it is; it's almost pourable. He puts the loaves on parchment paper for transferring outside to the oven, and places them into the oven on a pizza peel.

I like the decoration on the country loaves. Adam really scrapes and brushes out the floor of the oven so no soot gets into the loaves.  Then he sprays it liberally with water immediately after the bread goes in, to put moisture into the air and create that crispy crust we all love! Yumm!

Julia spent the time playing with Sandy.  Julia can almost speak that dog's language.  She made some little "yip yip" noise, she ran to the monkey bars, Sandy racing after her as fast as she could, and Julia just barely made it up before Sandy got her heels!!

The ciabatta above; all the bread below.

Supper: homemade spaghetti sauce, at Adam's request, to go with the ciabatta.

I love the look of fire. I love watching it sigh and crackle and smolder. But still photos of fire are almost more beautiful than watching it in motion. The tails of flame look like ghosts captured unwittingly on film.