Team Supreme

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday July 24, 2007

Matthew Evans

Matthew Evans goes one step further than homemade pizza dough - he builds the wood-fired oven, too.

"More water," calls Alan Watt encouragingly as three eager students mix up a batter. "You want a firm but malleable paste."

We're preparing to make pizza and, while this feels like cooking, it's not. The batter we're massaging is made from clay and has found its way beneath our fingernails and up our arms. We've smashed the firm clay with hammers and sieved it to mix with coarse sawdust. The mixing bowl is a large wheelbarrow.

We're on day two, the final day, of Watt's wood-fired oven building workshop and already our two ovens have taken shape. One has even taken heat. There's a small fire on the hearth, heating and drying the clay even as we smear it on the outside. Within three hours we'll be eating pizza, cooked in the newest version of the oldest oven around.

At a private house in Canberra, 15 of us have gathered to build ovens. These aren't food snobs or city-slicker restaurant-goers. They're people fascinated by the technology and the ability to entertain using nothing more up-to-date than timber. There's something primordial about going back to the fundamentals, the bringing together of earth, water and fire, that taps into our communal roots.

The street outside is littered with utes and four-wheel-drives. In the backyard there are several blokey looking blokes; men in King Gees and work boots with rough hands. There's also a granny from Port Macquarie, a winemaker from Murrumbateman and a lawyer or two. Everybody has the same thing in mind: to grasp an ancient technology that is back in vogue.

We're given a run down of the weekend's program, are introduced to terms such as crusher dust and vermiculite, plus the slightly scary concept of shrinkage, then set to work. Watt was head of ceramics at Australian National University for 19 years, so he knows his clays. Building an oven, I learn, is really easy. But you need specialised materials, an expert on hand, a team of enthusiastic people and a place to put it. To be fair, we built two ovens in two days - high- and low-tech versions - but we did work a fair bit, too.

Within hours of starting, the low-tech oven already has an insulating base of Hebel brick, topped with pavers held down by fireproof cement. In goes a pre-made door mould and a ring of vertical pavers to give the walls a firm base. Next, we fill the gap with brickies' sand and shape it. The sand acts as a mould. It's smothered in a layer of clay mixed with sisal rope filaments that we've shredded by hand, crusher dust (smashed rocks, as far as I can tell), sand and water, all stirred together.

Our host's homemade biscuits vanish at the first tea break. We've brought our own lunch and sit chatting, sorting the dreamers from the builders. Most, it would seem, are keen to build.

Dean, an architect, rapidly takes notes. He intends to start his oven within weeks (see sidebar on being popular). Ralph lives on a property out of town, which is blessed with plenty of fallen timber. He wants an oven with a small carbon footprint. Vera wants to build one for her daughter who lives near Bungendore.

"Is this texture right?" we keep asking Watt. "How much clay to sand, how much sisal, how much water?"

There's no set answer, Watt explains, as all clay - and this can be gathered from cuttings in roads or from farm dams - has its own "plasticity".

As we crouch in the carport smashing chunks of clay with our mallets, the team making the high-tech oven lords it over us, giving us stick about how labour-intensive our oven is. Their oven uses shop-bought materials, from small iron filaments to give the concrete strength, to decomposed granite used as a heat bank. Compared with ours, it's a huge, swank masterpiece.

Theirs, however, can't be used for at least two weeks while the concrete dries. They realise the only way they'll get lunch on this second day is if our oven - made with mostly found materials - not only looks good but also works. There's one rule that unites both groups: no beers until the first pizza is in the oven. And in it goes, right on lunchtime.

The mood is euphoric. Pizza is passed around, toasted with beer and local wine. A lot of backslapping, warm glowing and general bonhomie fills the backyard. We're eating food cooked in an oven crafted by our hands. You can't get more fundamentally rewarding than that.

Now it's your turn

The low-tech oven costs about $160 in materials; the high-tech oven costs are closer to $800. Oven building is at once simple and complex. Get advice, talk to the council, buy a book or three or take a course. See Alan Watt's website at www.woodfiredovenworkshops.com.

WARM FRIENDSHIPS

When asked whether his new oven made him popular with his mates, Dean McPherson says, "Bloody oath." Having a wood-fired oven is the equivalent of having a pool (without the maintenance); once you've got one, you discover friends you never realised you had.

"People love it," McPherson says of the oven he built and lit five times in the eight weeks since Watt's workshop. McPherson finds the family and friends he invites want to be there not just to eat but also for the lighting of the oven.

"It takes 75-80 minutes to heat up to 350C," says McPherson, so there's time for a drink and a few olives before the pizza hits the tiles.

For some, having an oven in the backyard is more important than a Hills Hoist. When looking for a new house seven years ago, Sydney Seafood School manager Roberta Muir insisted it have space to build a wood-fired oven, which husband Franz Scheurer (the foodie website guru) lights for big parties.

On the South Coast, Stuart Whitelaw, owner of The River Moruya restaurant, keeps his friends happy using a small kit oven he bought from Verona Ovens, which also built Muir's.

"What I love is that it's so bloody fail-safe," says Whitelaw of this method of cooking. "We put in the Christmas turkey or a whole kingfish ... it's not just for pizza."

Whitelaw has used his two-pizza sized oven to feed a group of 40. "A pizza only takes three to four minutes," he says. "It's the easiest way to entertain."

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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