Build your own bread oven from scratch. Work with bricks, adobe, cob, refractory concrete, or buy an bread or pizza oven kit.

Build your own oven from scratch

The Bread Site of the Masonry Stove Builders

The best page of links to do-it-yourself bread oven building. Be sure to also read Kiko Denzer’s book, Earth Ovens

Building a Cobb or Adobe bread oven in Pictures

There are many pages on the internet showing how to build an earth oven. This page, posted by the Masonry Heater Builders of North American is the best. And don’t forget to get Kiko Denzer’s book on building cobb and adobe ovens!

Ovencrafters

Alan Scott’s web site, buy plans for brick ovens.

Turf Oven – A Recreation of a Saxon Oven circa 950-1066

A pretty good description, if a little rough around the edges, of how to build and operate a simple bread oven. At the least, this site demonstrates that you don’t have to spend ot (anything) to make a bread oven.

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Pre-fabricated oven kits

A Page of Links: USA

This is a page of links to approximately ten suppliers of pre-cast bread ovens.

Le Panyol: France and USA and Canada

The leading French supplier of pre-cast bread ovens. The oven is distributed in Canada and the United States through the Main Wood Heat Company. This is the oven that Pierre Delacretaz, the Swiss ethnologist and oven restorer, thought was the best pre-cast oven. It is made of natural clay.

Mugniani: USA

A leading importer of refractory terra cotta ovens from Italy. I know several people who have Mugniani ovens and are very happy with them.

Superior Clay Corporation: USA

Associated with the leading American supplier of Rumford Fireplaces. This oven is made in the United States.

Vesuvio Italian Ovens is the distributor of a commercial pizza oven. The height of the ceilings range from 44cm to 52cm depending on the model.

Other countries: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Great Britain, etc.

Please e-mail me with links to other suppliers of bread oven kits.

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A community oven operated by a village club

L’Association du P’tit Four de Thielle-Wavre In French)

This is the web site for the members of a cooperative that shares a village bread oven. I include this link because I think that this cooperative suggests a way that a small bakery, a friendly neighborhood, a trailer park, or a condominium project could build a community around the shared pleasure of using a communal bread oven.

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French Bread Oven Pages

La salle du pain: (In French)

Photographs of the room where bread was prepared in a Swiss mountain house. This site includes a recipe for a local bread that includes rye flour and potatoes. The link to the “four banal” shows the community bread oven. We have come to associate rye bread with Germany and Russia — but rye was a common flour in bread — or the only flour — whereever it was cold — in the Northern European mountains — and, of course, wherever the growing season favored rye over other grains, including in England

Pierre Delacrétaz: (In French)

This the home page for the late Pierre Delacrétaz (1933-2001). His book on bread ovens is unsurpasssed. You can order it from Amazon.com on my page of recommended books. Mr. Delacrétaz was a man of many passions—bread ovens, water mills, megoliths, to name a few. I am very thankful that his family maintains this site.

The Quebec Bread Oven Film: (In French)

If you are passionate about bread ovens then, sooner or later, you will come across a reference to the legendary adobe bread ovens of Quebec. An excellent book on the subject can be found on my list of recommended books. This is a documentary, in French, about the ovens and the people who made them. Examples of the Quebec oven can be found at the Masonry Stove Builder’s site, above.

Le Four Banal du Chazelet (In French)

This is also an oven that is used to make a 100% rye bread. There is a village festival for rye bread in November of each year. Chazelet is in the French Alps.