Purpose of this blog

This blog will really be a true web log. I will post here about different wood-fired ovens as I find them.

If you know of any wood-fired ovens I should know about, you can send an e-mail to me. (If you build wood-fired ovens, I would like to hear from you too.)

There will lots of posts and lots of labels, since I plan to create one post for every appropriate web site that I find, and however many labels it takes to describe each one (usually at least the type of page and the location of the oven).

The accumulated information will still be found at the real Quest for Ovens web site links pages, but that is not updated as frequently as this blog will be.

If you are from outside the US and Canada, let me know what you find interesting about it. I see that I get visitors from India and Iran, and other faraway places. I'd like to know what draws you to this blog.

I received e-mail from the organizers of the BBC Two television show asking if the Saint Paul Bread Club could post a notice about their show Great British Bake-Off for amateur bakers. The information they gave me is now accessible through a link. (The organizers don't have a web page for the show itself yet.)

Please share this with any amateur bakers in Great Britain you may know, or post the link where they might see it.

Thanks.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Community Oven, Elst, Belgium

My Google Alert pulled up a post on Flanders Today about a community oven in Elst, Belgium.

There is a short season where a regional specialty called geutelingen are baked, using a traditional recipe and in a traditional wood-fired oven.

The post has a good picture.

The post says in part, "Meanwhile the men at the oven work as a team, one filling the other's long-handled dipper with dough, which is then poured directly onto the hot oven base in rows. They keep a steady tempo, a wonderfully synchronised coordination of movements. The geutelingen puff up and bake quickly, in only a few minutes, before being removed and transferred to a cooling rack, where they flatten down naturally."