Reddit reviews The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens

This Allen Scott book is awesome. It even includes plans. You can also get the digital version in google books. Im planning on building an oven soon, hopefully this summer..Good luck!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bread-Builders-Hearth-Masonry/dp/1890132055

The Bread Builders by Dan Wing and Alan Scott.

In addition to the process from grain > baking, there is a nice section on how to bake in a wood fired oven, how to build one, how to manage the heat, and there is an interview with a german microbiologist about sourdough starters and their makeup.

As others are saying here, I think you should keep your current trees. By cleaning them up a bit, I think you could get them to look really nice.

If you're looking for plans to build your own brick oven, check out The Bread Builders. It's by far the best resource out there.

If you're looking to buy your oven, I'd suggest Chicago Brick Oven. They have a slightly higher dome than Forno Bravo, which gives a better heating profile, and they're lower dome than some of the terra cotta ones, which have a massive cool spot in the top.

I have a strange amount of experience with pizza ovens, and I've used quite a few, so feel free to pm with questions.

The idea of using a bread machine rustles my jimmies; I use the no-knead method (google it, it's everywhere) for sandwich bread that we eat every day, and then sometimes on weekends I'll make a rustic loaf to go with meals that I make in the more traditional method.

Looking for a bread 'recipe' is somewhat of a fallacy. Most people who take bread even a little seriously use the baker's percentage (once again, google that shit) and weighing ingredients instead of measuring by volume.

The baker's percentage gives you a template of proportions that yield certain results. By manipulating those proportions of flour/grains/water/yeast/salt you get different breads. A french loaf is still a french loaf if you make it with whole wheat flour instead of all purpose flour, as long as you understand how the change in protein and such will affect the bread, and adjust your other ingredients and methods accordingly.

The only accurate way to adjust those ratios is by using a reasonably accurate scale instead of measuring cups. A good scale (not even a mediocre one) can be had from Amazon for about $20. This is the one that I use, and it's paid for itself several times over since I started making bread about two years ago.

These two concepts, which go hand-in-hand, elevated my bread making from dicking around in the kitchen to a near science.

After about six months of making bread every week, you should check out The Bread Builders. When I originally bought it I didn't understand enough about bread to get much out of it, but now I find it to be a huge resource for adjusting my methods and techniques. There's a lot of esoteric stuff in there about microbiology and gluten strings, which is cool, but essentially useless unless you have some kind of context. There's also the whole second half of the book, which is almost entirely about building and using wood fired brick ovens to bake bread; something that I hope to have the funds to build one day.

You can check out /r/breaddit if you want, but I find it to be a bit of a circlejerk on seeing how much cheese/nutella/olives/onions people can cram in a recipe before it starts to look like a casserole instead of bread. Also, they have a hard on for sourdoughs. Sourdoughs are cool, but at this point I think they could use their own subreddit.

Good luck, I guess.
Good luck

http://www.sourdoughhome.com/index.php?content=starterprimer

Basically, by continually feeding with fresh flour and water, you're creating an optimal environment for yeast, allowing them to outcompete other organisms that might try to colonize rotting/spoiling food on your counter, like mold or bacteria.

I'm also not so certain that local yeast cultures would eventually push out foreign cultures – the idea is to keep the population of the starter culture so overwhelmingly composed of the strains you want (first by inoculating, or catching from wild, then by tuning the environment and food), other organisms, local yeasts included, can't establish a foothold. This is why starters have a much higher chance of going bad in the beginning, before any strains have become firmly established. I have no scientific evidence either way, though.

Also, The Bread Builders has lots of theory and abstract techniques, if you're interested, but no recipes.

I have helped my Dad build his! We used instructions from a book called The Bread Builders. The oven that we made was really big. Like the size of a small shed. And we had to dig footers, lay cinder block(we actually had to employ the help of our mason neighbor) and all that jazz. We ended up using about 2 tons of cement by the end of it. Here is a link for the few work in progress picture I have. However, in the end it turned out supper nice! We both like using it a lot. I does take some practice to be able to fire it right, but when you do, the results are so much better than a conventional oven. It also slow cooks meat really well!

I was just looking for that ratio. I know I've seen it before, but googleing 'pizza oven height ratio' didn't lead me to it... got a source you'd share? I have, The Bread Builders but it is in storage.