Its often said that one of the first signs of spring is hearing a cuckoo, which I suppose depends upon where you live, whereas in our world the first sign of spring is the first day  we light the bread oven in a year.

So this year spring has come early, it was such a mild weekend, and I was having a weekend of setting fire to things. I suppose I should explain that statement. Yesterday I finished making a set of wooden wheels, and the last and undoubtedly the best part of the process is when you heat up the steel tyre in a fire to expand it and then slip it over the wooden wheel, quenching it with water in great clouds of steam when amazingly it shrinks back clamping the wheel. I have done this loads of times, I understand the science, and I am still amazed every time it works. But I digress at the end of the process of making a wheel I end up with lots of odd shape pieces of Hard Wood left over. Now the big pieces I turn into charcoal ( if you want to see how look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH6RrY8oWd4). The little pieces go for firewood and as it was such a lovely day what could be better than fire up the wood fired bread oven for the first time this year.

If your interested there is a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCcGtEqZX9E which gives you some more details. There is a considerable difference between a bread oven and the wood fired pizza oven, with the fire in a separate chamber, although you can cook pizza in it. Obviously as I built a bread oven I believe their best, but who cares all that matters is that it bakes magnificent bread

tom

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