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There is such beautiful potential in mud. I say that as a ceramicist, but also as a baker; the very first loaves of bread were baked in mud ovens, which are still used all over the world today! If building an oven sounds intimidating, try setting those thoughts aside. Trust the sense of touch and form encoded into your human history. Get muddy. Get messy. Have fun. 

This project is about trust: trust your instincts, trust your hands, trust the feeling of mud between your toes and fingers. This project is about connection: hide secrets in your oven, cover it with treasures you’ve collected, create it out of pieces of your landscape. And finally, this project is about play: dance with the earth, get messy and muddy, laugh a lot, and experiment!

While it takes a couple of days or even a couple of weekends to build a large earthen oven, a small oven can be built in just one or two messy afternoons! In it, you can bake small loaves, little cakes, or tasty flatbreads! It’ll give you a taste of the process of building with mud… and it’s up to you where to go from there... 

Before you begin, consider a few things. How many of the materials do you want to try to source from your landscape? This can be a very inexpensive project if you are willing to do the digging, sifting, and processing of earth, sand, and other materials yourself! Some of your materials may contain great meaning (the mud from your favorite river bank, cattail fluff from a wild outing with your sister, sand from a beach you love to camp on, etc.)  Consider, too, what stories you want your oven to contain. You’ll be using little glass bottles as insulation in the base of your oven, perfect for containing secret messages entombed in earth. Intention is a powerful thing, and I absolutely believe that whatever you write will influence the way you use your oven. Will you write love letters to the people you want to break bread with? Blessings to the home and hearth where you reside? Prayers to God(s), goddesses, or deities? Poems about gratitude? Letters to loved ones no longer with you, who you wish you could share one more meal with? Only you know what these bottles should contain, and you can keep that a secret since the earth won’t be telling anyone. Finally, consider if there are any meaningful objects or decorations you’d like to embed into the surface of the oven. Things like polished stones, glass pebbles, ceramic tiles, and seashells all make wonderful embellishments, and can carry a lot of personal meaning with them. 

Earth ovens are so much more personal than modern kitchen appliances, especially if you make one yourself. Creating and baking in an earthen oven is a return to the elements, a dance of earth, water, air, and fire. No matter your background, building with the earth is almost certainly coded into your ancestry, since if you go back far enough, nearly all civilizations have developed their own way of building ovens out of earth. It’s something so very human, so deeply ingrained in our connection to our past and our landscape, it gives me goosebumps! You’ll be dancing on earth and water, breathing life into fire, and allowing the radiant heat from the air and the earth to cook your food for you. Now that’s magic! 

Find the rest of this post and the Craft Club Instructions over on Patreon.com/thewondersmith!

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