Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you just how long, but because I’ve been documenting our food life in excruciating detail for two years now, I can tell you precisely how long: eleven months and nine days.

It was eleven months and nine days ago that both – both! – our pizza stones cracked as they cooled. Kevin had perfected a two-stone system, with one near the oven bottom to cook the pie, and one just under the broiler to finish off the topping, and we’d been using it without mishap for several years. This time, though, we woke the next morning to find that both of the stones in pieces in the oven.

I don’t know what we did wrong, or even differently. If it was cold in the house, perhaps the stones cooled too quickly. Maybe they had simply come to the end of their natural life. Or maybe we’d somehow offended Pan, the god of pizza. In any case, we were stoneless.

But it didn’t matter, because we were this close to finishing our outdoor wood-burning oven, which would make far better pizza than our indoor propane-burning version.

Because I’ve been documenting our food life in excruciating detail for two years now, I can tell you precisely when we broke ground for the wood-fired oven: November 18, 2009. I’d gotten a good start on the foundation that fall, and anticipated finishing the oven in the spring.

So, a year and five days ago, given that I was expecting wood-fired pizza as soon as the ground unfroze, I didn’t replace the pizza stones.

Some of you may know that our wood-fired oven construction didn’t go as planned. When the ground unfroze, I decided that I didn’t like the way I’d built the base, so I tore the whole thing down. I did finally manage to rebuild it in a way that seemed acceptable, but it took me until the middle of the summer. Then it took another few months – and a couple of serious mistakes – for us to get around to building the firebrick deck.

That’s as far as we got last season, and the base and the deck are covered with a tarp as we wait for spring and oven-building season.

Had I known it was going to be that long, I would have replaced the damn pizza stones. But now I feel like wood-fired pizza is truly within our grasp, and I can’t bring myself to shell out the forty bucks to get stones that we’ll only use for a couple of months. But my stepson Eamon was visiting, and we really wanted to make pizza.

Then Kevin had an idea. “Honey,” he said, with that gleam in his eye, “I have an idea.”

I know something about the kind of ideas that Kevin has, so I prepared myself by checking the fire extinguisher and making sure our homeowner’s insurance was up to date.

“So, when the wood-fired oven is done …” he began.

“Or hell freezes over, whichever comes first,” I interrupted.

He rolled his eyes, and started again.

“So, when the wood-fired oven is done, we’ll be cooking the pizzas right on the deck, right?”

“Right …” I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going.

““And the deck is made of firebrick, right?”

“Right.”

“And we have extra firebrick, right?”

“Uh … right.”

So let’s just arrange the firebrick in the oven and use it like a pizza stone.” He smiled triumphantly.

Astonishingly, I didn’t see a damn thing wrong with that plan.

In fact, we had enough confidence in it to invite our friends Todd and Beth Marcus and their two enthusiastic pizza-eating sons to join us. (We did not – I repeat, not – invite them because they are the owners of Cape Cod Beer and we anticipated that they would show up with a cooler full of their product, plus some ice cream.)

And Kevin pulled it off. The day before, he made pizza dough (we use the recipe from Franny’s, in Brooklyn, and swear by Sir Lancelot high-gluten flour from King Arthur), and he spent most of Thursday prepping toppings – caramelized onions, Italian-style turkey sausage, tomato sauce, and the white sauce for his signature clam pie.

The day of, he found ten of our cleanest bricks and arranged them in the oven. They were too heavy for the oven shelf, so we had to prop it up from underneath, and we probably covered too much of the surface of the shelf so the air didn’t circulate as well as it might have, but he turned the oven on several hours in advance and the bricks got nice and hot.

The Marcus family arrived (with their cooler!), and Kevin started making pizza. When he put each pie in, he turned the broiler on so the bricks would cook it from underneath and broiler from above. And he turned out perfectly cooked pizza after perfectly cooked pizza, with nothing but an el-cheapo Maytag stove and a few firebricks. I can’t wait to see what he can do with a real wood-fired oven. Let’s hope hell waits at least one more season before it freezes over.

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And small wonder. The idea that you can use found and natural materials to create an oven that makes better bread and pizza than whatever stove you have in your kitchen is vastly appealing.

Mortar covers a multitude of sins

In a nutshell, this is how you do it. You create a platform at a comfortable working height. You lay a floor of firebricks. You use sand to sculpt a mold that’s the shape of the oven’s interior. You build the clay oven around the mold. Scrape out the sand, cure the clay with a low fire, and you’re good to bake.

I’d read reports of people building these things for less than twenty dollars. Sand and clay, the key ingredients, can usually be dug up right out of the ground. Firebricks, you probably have to pay for, but even they can sometimes be salvaged or scavenged.

A wood-fired oven for twenty bucks! And not only that, you can build the thing in a weekend! Count me in.

That was last fall. We have now been working on the thing, off and on, but mostly off, for almost a year. This week, we broke the thousand-dollar mark on materials.

I blame Kristen.

No, that’s not really true. I only blame Kristen for half.

It’s like this. Kristen’s family runs a business called Drywall Masonry Supplies, with three locations in the area. By the time we first showed up in their South Yarmouth store, the wood-fired oven had already acquired a life of its own. I’d spent the first $500. on two pallets of stone, out of which I painstakingly built the base of the oven. We’d gotten to the point where we had decided to build a concrete base for the hearth, and we were looking for refractory mortar.

How did we get from building a simple clay dome on firebricks set in sand to building the kind of oven that requires a base of refractory concrete? That’s a damn good question, and I have no satisfactory answer.

We walked into the store, which caters to contractors and builders and other types who know what they’re doing, and asked the guy behind the counter whether they had refractory mortar. He wasn’t sure, and he referred us to Kristen, who came out of the back office to help.

Kristen is the kind of woman who exudes competence. From the moment she told us that she didn’t have the refractory mortar, but could order it for us, I knew we were dealing with someone who knew what she was doing.

She asked us what we were planning to do, and we explained. We told her we weren’t quite sure how to use the mortar – what proportions we use it in, how liquid it should be, how long it takes to cure. She told us she knew people who’d built wood-fired ovens, and she started making phone calls.

I was amazed. Here’s a business that must get the vast majority of its business from professionals who buy in large quantities. Yet, when two shmendricks with a wood-fired oven walk into her store, Kristen takes the time to help us figure out exactly what we need and exactly what to do with it.

The kiln shelves that didn't quite work out

But it gets better. One of the people Kristen called was a mason named Tony. Tony had built his own wood-fired oven, and knew all about it. She got him on the phone, and after five minutes of relaying my questions to him and his answers to me, she handed me the receiver.  Tony asked me about our oven, and then started to tell me exactly what to do with the concrete. After a few minutes, though, he stopped. “Are you at the store?” he asked. I told him I was. “We’re only ten minutes from there. Would you like to come by and see my oven?”

There are lots of things I miss about Manhattan, and lots of things about small-town living that chafe. But this was the kind of experience that shows small towns in their very best light. The proprietor of a local business took the time to put us in touch with someone who could help us, and that someone promptly invited two total strangers to his home.

Of course we’d like to come by and see his oven!

Tony turned out to be not just helpful, but interesting. After college, he’d spent many years in Europe, playing professional basketball. When he came back to the United States, he discovered both that desk jobs didn’t agree with him and that he loved working with stone. It’s fitting that his two careers have been basketball and masonry, because they’re two of the jobs where it’s a real asset to have hands the size of dinner plates. If he gets tired of masonry, I think Tony’s got a future in rodeo, or maybe fingerpainting.

He showed us his oven, which is a beautiful thing. I wish I’d had my camera so I could show you. It’s a brick dome over a brick floor, built on a bricked platform, and it’s surrounded by a structure that protects it from wind and rain.  It was obviously built by somebody with real skill.

The firebrick hearth. Not perfect, but serviceable

As soon as Kevin saw it, all thoughts of Kiko Denzer and Mother Earth News went the way of all flesh. Clay would not suffice. We needed brick.

It was all over.

From there, we needed the castable refractory mortar, the fireclay, the masonry cement, and even the sand. And bricks. Bazillions of bricks.

We thought we were going to get away with just the bricks to build the dome. We’d inherited some kiln shelves from Diane Heart, a potter a few towns over, and we were planning to use them for the hearth. Unfortunately, they weren’t as flat as a hearth, ideally, should be, and when we set them on the concrete base we’d poured, they didn’t seem viable, so we decided to put a layer of bricks on top of them to try and flatten out the surface.

That’s where we are now. The deck is done, the dome is coming. We’re $1000. and one year in. This pizza better be good.

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I have a cement mixer

And I suppose cake batter is a little like concrete. You take an amalgam of dry ingredients, mix it with water, and it hardens as it dries. That, though, is where the similarity ends. The thing about cake batter concrete is that, if you add back the water, it turns back into cake batter. Not so with actual concrete. And a good thing too, or our bridges, roads, and buildings would wash away in the first rainstorm.

What’s interesting and valuable about concrete is that, once it hardens, it’s hard for all time. You can pour it into a form when it’s wet, and then, when it’s dry, you’ve got what is essentially a rock in the shape of your form.

Astonishingly, both the Romans and the Egyptians figured out concrete thousands of years ago, and it figures in the pyramids and the Pantheon.

It’s astonishing because concrete is complicated.

The key ingredient in concrete is cement. The most common kind of cement is Portland cement, so called because the guy who invented a process to make it, a bricklayer named Joseph Aspdin, thought that the concrete made with it resembled limestone quarried from the Isle of Portland, a little landmass in the English Channel.

Cement starts by heating rock to something over 2500 degrees (F). But not just any old rock will do. It has to have the right balance of calcium and silicon, iron and aluminum. A mix of limestone and clay is a good starting point.

When you heat limestone and clay, you end up with a lot of complicated chemical reactions. I wish I could boil them down for you here, but my I’m afraid my chemical education isn’t up to the task even of understanding them, let alone explaining them. After those complicated chemical reactions have taken place, you end up with a substance called clinker, which looks like little stones. Grind those stones to a powder, and you’ve got cement.

But the chemistry doesn’t end there. When you add water to the cement, there are yet more complicated reactions I can’t explain, and some molecules bind to other molecules and you end up with something resembling stone.

There! Got that?

Our slab frame, holes plugged with those all-purpose materials, newspaper and duct tape

Not understanding the chemistry gave me pause. I thought our chances for a successful concrete pouring would be vastly increased if we actually understood what was going on. But ignorance hasn’t stopped us from launching into chickens, bees, mushrooms, or, most recently, turkeys, so why should it stop us from building a concrete pizza-making edifice?

We forged ahead.

To make concrete out of cement, you mix it with aggregate. Now, although aggregate sounded to me like something technical and specific, it turns out that ‘aggregate’ is just another word for ‘rubble.’ Even, colloquially, ‘crap.’ The point is to mix in a bunch of little hard things that the cement then bonds together, and just about any little hard thing will do.

The little hard things can be very little, like sand, or much less little, like rock and pieces of crushed brick. Usually, a combination of little things and less little things is what’s recommended.

Beyond the size of the aggregate, we had another concern. Since what we were pouring was the base for the deck of an oven, we needed some degree of heat-resistance. Ordinary concrete is good up to about 800 degrees (F), and then it starts doing things like cracking and, more alarmingly, spalling. Spalling is when a piece of the structure separates from the structure itself, sometimes explosively. It’s profoundly undesirable.

I read up on heat-resistance and found very little – ahem – concrete information. From what I could glean, it was generally made of a lightweight, insulating aggregate like perlite.

Okay, I reasoned. We have a supply of kiln bricks, which are lightweight and insulating. They crush relatively easily. Wouldn’t crushed kiln brick make a nice, heat-resistant aggregate?

I haven’t the foggiest idea whether this is true. I know you can’t reason out chemistry. But I had the kiln brick and I needed the heat-resistant concrete, so what the hell.

We set about crushing the kiln brick. When I say it crushes easily, I mean that if you drop a sledgehammer on it, it breaks into pieces. Drop it again, you get smaller pieces. You have to drop several times to get the crumbs we were looking for, and crushing enough kiln brick for our oven deck was a daunting task.

We looked for a way to mechanize the process, and found it in the form of a bedsheet and a truck. We wrapped the bricks in the sheet, and then ran over them, and over them and over them, with the truck.

When we unwound the bedsheet, we found that there were still a lot of pieces that were too big. Since this was going to be the base on which we put the kiln shelves that will be our oven floor, we needed a relatively smooth surface, and big chunks just won’t do. So we got out the compost sieve and ran the crushed brick through. What we ended up with was a mix that went from dust up to the size of peas. It was good enough.

This was the mix we used, a bastardization of a mix I read about on a wood-fired oven site:

3 parts crushed kiln brick
2 parts sand
2 parts Portland cement
½ part lime

There’s a good chance we used the wrong kind of aggregate, the wrong kind of cement, and the wrong kind of lime (we used whatever it was they sold at K-mart’s garden department). The only other mistake we could make was using either too little water, or too much.

I suspect we did both. Because we had to form a flat slab on an irregular surface, we made a wooden frame the size of the slab and set it on the stone base. Invariably, it wasn’t level and there were lots of gaps underneath.

To make sure the concrete didn’t leak out the gaps at the bottom, we made the first batch very stiff. We forced it into the places where the frame didn’t meet the stone (having stuffed newspaper underneath to prevent escape). Then, though, we needed to make a mix that was liquid enough to make a flat surface. We did that, and poured it on top. Will the two layers bond together properly? Who knows.

The finished product

What we ended up with was a decent approximation of what we were trying to build, but I am not sanguine. I’m convinced that, at the first firing of the oven or the first frost, the whole thing is going to crack and collapse.

Kevin, on the other hand, is convinced that it’s way overengineered, and that when aliens land on the planet, long after humans are extinct, they will find our wood-fired oven base and believe it was some kind of altar for religious rituals.

All I can say is, this pizza better be good.

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This is not to say I’ve become a master of any of these things. I’ve simply become competent, more or less.

So many skills have a Sisyphean learning curve

Other skills don’t come so easily. Fishing, for example. Dominic, the Zen Master of Trout, trolls by our back door most mornings from April to November. He’s caught more fish in our lake than anyone ever has or will. He routinely hooks twenty or thirty in a day, and his record is over fifty. And, get this – he doesn’t even like trout! He releases them all to be caught again another day.

Dominic knows exactly what lure, at what depth, using what technique is the right thing for the time of year, the water temperature, and the cloud cover. He knows this because he’s been fishing this lake for thirty years, and keeps meticulous records.

The first try

Hunting, I suspect, will be a lot like fishing, and I expect to suck at it for a long time. Gardening, too, is very tough to master. And brewing fermented beverages is much harder than it looks. So many skills have a Sisyphean learning curve – you struggle up the long slope and, just as you think you’re really learning something, you’re sent tumbling back to the bottom by a wily trout, a fast-moving pheasant, or the late blight.

The presence of actual, genuine stones should have been my first clue that stonework is a skill of the Sisyphean variety.

When I first tackled the stone walls that will form the pedestal of our wood-fired oven, it’s not that I thought it would be easy. It’s not that I’d thought I’d build a thing of beauty, like a Lew French fireplace. It’s that I honestly figured that fitting stones together wouldn’t be so difficult that, if I devoted time and effort to it, I couldn’t turn out a decent product.

It turns out that building a decent product is damn near impossible.

I blame the stones. While they have many fine qualities – attractiveness and durability come to mind –flexibility isn’t their long suit. A stone is secure in its identity, and its self-esteem is such that, if it doesn’t want to play nice with the other stones, no amount of cajoling will change its mind.

The second try. Yeah, I know.

Trying to jostle, chisel, and hammer two pallets of independent-minded rocks into a unified whole has proven to be one of the most difficult undertakings I’ve undertaken since we began the Starving project over a year ago. I’ve already disassembled it once and, with help and a few boulders from our friend Rick, built it back up again. It’s marginally better than it was the first time, but the emphasis is on marginally.

I know it’s putting the Sisy is Sisyphus to refuse to tear it down yet again and build it a third time, but that’s what I’m going to do. Partly, this is because I don’t have any confidence that the third attempt will be any better than the second, but it’s also because we want to actually bake pizza some time before hell freezes over.

So, as spring wears on, I will continue to jostle, chisel, and hammer to the best of my emphatically meager abilities. As soon as I’m done, though, I’m going shellfishing.

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Q: What do you get when cross a Mafioso with a deconstructionist?

A: Someone who makes you an offer you can’t understand.

Do you have to be anti-intellectual to think that’s funny? I hope not. It’s just that I’m straightforward to the bone, and wouldn’t know subtext if it jumped up and bit me, so a school of literary criticism that maintains that things mean either A) the exact opposite of what you think they mean, or B) nothing at all, holds few attractions for me.

(The trend toward deconstructionism in food, though, cracks me up. Put the peanut butter next to the jelly and voila! you’re post-modern!)

My first attempt at stonework

Literary deconstruction, the kind that gets the –ism, bears little resemblance to literal deconstruction, no -ism. While deconstructionism is abstruse and abstract, plain old deconstruction is accessible and concrete – particularly when it involves rocks.

Back in the fall I started building the foundation for our wood-fired oven. We bought two pallets of stones and spread them all around what passes for our front yard. We dug a hole, four feet by four feet, and filled it in with the kind of sand that is supposed to interlock and make a solid base. Then I started building the base, one stone at a time.

It started off pretty well, I thought. I used big, flat stones that stacked well and looked good. Unfortunately, as the walls got higher, the job got harder, both because I was working with an increasingly irregular surface and because I was running out of good stones. I persevered, though, and the thing was about three feet high when I decided it was just no good.

Rick's wall

I had help with this decision from our friend Rick. Rick is a stone guy. He reads about stones, he thinks about stones, he scours the countryside for wayward stones and takes them home to bring order to the landscape around his house. He built a beautiful retaining wall at the foot of the hill that slopes down from his front door, and he has a stone staircase leading down to his waterfront.

As soon as I saw Rick’s work, I knew I’d have to start over. As soon as Rick saw my work, he agreed. Sigh. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected to become a stonemason overnight.

There was no song in my heart as I started removing the stones I had so painstakingly stacked. No matter what you’re doing, moving stones is hard, but when you’re constructing it’s so … constructive. Deconstructing is just deflating.

Hey, maybe it’s got something in common with deconstructionism after all.

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When we came home – tanned, rested, and with a renewed emphasis on our short game – I found my wedding gift. There in my kitchen, wrapped up and with a giant bow on top, was a brand new Viking stove. My husband had bought it on the sly and had it installed while we were gone.

Perhaps not every woman would appreciate a stove as a wedding present, the implication being that she would spend her married life tethered to it, but I actually shed tears. I couldn’t have imagined a better gift. (What did I get him, you may ask? Not a bloody thing. It didn’t even occur to me that one’s own wedding was a gift-giving occasion. To have a husband who not only gives you a Viking stove for your wedding, but doesn’t resent it when you give him nothing at all, is a wonderful thing.)

I’ve never been big on kitchen equipment. I figure that, if you can cook, you can cook with anything. I use Costco-brand nonstick pots and pans (they’re the best bargain in cookware; try them if you’re in the market), and run-of-the-mill Henckel’s knives that should always be sharper than they are. Give me a heat source – any heat source – and I’ll make you dinner.

But give me a heat source like a Viking stove, and I’ll make you dinner with a song in my heart. It gets so hot! You can sear things properly and heat things quickly. And it goes so low! You can simmer things for hours without boiling off all the liquid. And the cast-iron burners distribute the heat so you don’t get hot spots! Zip-a-dee-doo-dah!

When we moved to the Cape, I had to leave my Viking behind, and I’m back to cooking on the same kind of crappy stove I’d been cooking on all my life. And I’m fine with that. If you can cook, you can cook with anything.

Of course I miss my Viking, but there is a compensation. Now that we have land, we can build a wood-fired oven. Outdoors. A Viking, for all its charms, can only heat up to a little over 500 degrees. With a wood-fired oven, we ought to be able to hit 700 or 800. Any bakers out there know what that means. Pizza!

We’ve been perfecting our pizza-making for a couple years now. We (and I use the term loosely, it’s mostly Kevin) use King Arthur’s commercial high-protein flour, called Sir Lancelot, and a two-stone system that works pretty well in a conventional oven. But the best pizza – with the char on the bottom, the elasticity in the crust, the cooked-through topping – requires high heat.

The Fogazzo 850

We started planning our oven even before we closed on the house. We were leaning toward buying a beehive-shaped insert from a company called Fogazzo, which manufactures the domes and delivers them, to be installed in a housing you build for the purpose. The model we were considering, the 850, has a 33.5-inch diameter (inside), weighs 661 pounds, and costs $2399.

We choked a little on the $2399. After all, there were so many projects on our list. The stone patio. The wood floors. The guest house. The greenhouse. The barn. We needed a boat and a truck, and we had a long equipment wish list – rototiller, chainsaw, leaf blower, tractor. (Tractor!? That one’s Kevin’s.) Did we really want to spend $2399 on an oven insert when there were so many demands on our bank account?

And then I stumbled on Build Your Own Earth Oven, by Kiko Denzer. It’s a little book, not much more than a pamphlet, but it has detailed instructions for building an oven out of dirt.

Dirt? Yes, literally. The stuff the ground is made of. Clay, sand, soil – if it gets under your fingernails, you can build with it.

Our oven-to-be

At first, I was suspicious. Could that possibly work? But people have been building ovens for millennia, and they didn’t call 1-866-FOGAZZO. If it was good enough for the Sumerians, it’ s good enough for me. Besides, if it doesn’t work, we can tear it down, return it to the earth whence it came, and pick up the phone.

This week, we broke ground. The trickiest part of building an oven isn’t the oven itself; it’s the base, which has to be stable, well-insulated, and topped with a level, fire-proof deck that will be the oven’s floor. We bought two pallets of fieldstone, which will form the walls of the base. As we build it, I’ll tell you more (I know, I know, you’re on the edge of your seat).

A frenzy of activity

As of now, we’re just past the digging stage. The oven starts with a hole in the ground, filled with crushed bluestone, to make sure any moisture that gets trapped in the base has a place to drain, and to prevent movement from frost heave. We roped our friends Rick and Mary Ann, who have much more experience with stone than we do, into helping us dig the hole, and then we filled it with stone and topped it with a level layer of paver base (like sand, only it stays in place better) to form the bed for the fieldstone walls.

We chose a big, flat stone with a nice clean edge to be our cornerstone. And as soon as Kevin’s back recovers from the injury he did it moving that first stone, we’ll tackle the second. I don’t know how the Sumerians did this without Advil.

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