Location: Unity, Maine

Details: Albie Barden, Heater Builder and Co-Owner of Maine Wood Heat Co., will be working on a masonry heater with an upper chamber bake oven, heated bench and brick veneer in Unity, Maine during the last week of January. The project will be structured as a workshop hosted by the homeowner and taught by Albie. Any interested mason (beginner, intermediate or advanced) is welcome to join in. The cost of the workshop is $500. Food and lodging are not included.

The dates above are flexible. Participants may decide to work through the weekend. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, please call Maine Wood Heat Co. to register (207) 474-7465, or fill out our contact form below for more information.

Workshop Sign-Up Form

   Wood Fired Pizza & Artisan Bread Workshop
December 17th & 18th

Location:
MY KITCHEN
127 Green Street
South Jamesport, New York

Register:  Online or by phone (917) 887-6487

Schedule: Saturday Sessions: 10:30-3:30, 6:30-10:00; Sunday Session 10:00-3:00

A Message from Peter:

I am particularly excited to bring you this amazing workshop! I’ve got plenty of kiln dried hardwood to fire up the oven so we can turn out handcrafted pizzas, bake rustic Naturally Leavened Breads from freshly milled whole grain flour, and roast all sorts of goodies like Whole Northfork Fish, Local Duck, Autumn Vegetables and Fruits. And we’ll wash it all down with the juicy fruit forward wines of 2 of my very favorite local vineyards, Jamesport Vineyard and Shinn Estate.

Weekend Menu

Pizzas: Apple, Aged Cheddar, Sage and Bacon; Wild Mushroom, Caramelized Onion, and Gruyere; Autumn Squash, Radicchio, and Fontina

Breads: French Country Breads, Grape Harvest Foccacia, Sunday Morning Whole Grain Bagels!

Whole Roast Fish on a Bed of Leeks, Peconic Bay Oysters with Lemon Aioli, Rosemary Roast Duck, Honey Roasted Carrots and Parsnips with Anise, Roast Broccoli with Parmesan

Apple Gallette with Fresh Local Honey Ice Cream

Suffolk Downs saw its share of horsepower a few weeks ago as New England’s leading home and garden professionals arrived at the annual Boston Home Show.

We were invited by, and proud to team up with our partner, Joe Ventriglia of Terrascaping & Construction, an expert in designing and building masonry ovens, fireplaces and custom outdoor living spaces in homes and commercial estates across central Massachusetts. Hoping to light some fires with the locals and attendees, Scott and Joe showcased Le Panyol’s premier residential ovens, including the model 66 core package, the fully assembled Provence, and our own signature copper turnkey series.

A diverse group of show-goers kept the Le Panyol team busy with a wide range of wood fired oven questions. Happy with each day’s turnout, Joe and Scott were confident that their efforts to promote Le Panyol ovens had ignited the imaginations and interests of the food savvy attendees.

The show also hosted cooking demonstrations sponsored by “Boston’s Best” restaurant chefs, as well as free lectures for homeowners centered around the process of designing and building kitchens, baths and additions.

If you missed this event and would like to know more about Le Panyol ovens, Joe will be attending the New England Home Show also in Boston at the Seaport World Trade Center next weekend. Look for Terrascaping & Construction, and talk to Joe. Show specials on display models still apply!

In both the masonry heater and the cookstove, we installed stainless steel water jackets. In the heater the jacket is not in direct flame but is rather buried behind a layer of firebrick in the throat and it has a trickle charge effect on hot water production. This type of placement keeps the fire burning hot and clean. In the cookstove, with a much smaller firebox, we typically place the water jacket on the side of the firebox away from the oven as water jackets have been traditionally placed in cook stoves for generations and this water jacket heats up a lot of hot water quite rapidly. A cookstove firebox, being smaller and with the cook top directly above it, is burned hotter and does not get the same long flame path expected in the masonry heater, but we have never had a creosote issue with any of these cookstove water jacket applications. A Romanian neighbor helped them plumb the system up to a 30 gallon gravity fed copper hot water tank standing upright on an antique cast iron stand on the second floor. On the third floor loft Wes installed two one hundred gallon stainless steel tanks. These tanks are filled from their well with electricity generated by their solar panels mounted outside the kitchen corner of their log home. Once the tanks are filled, Wes shuts off the pump. After the cookstove has fired for as little as half an hour, water at the sink flows down hot from the copper tank and the tank is automatically refilled by gravity from the two storage tanks higher up.

When we built the heater and cooker, Wes and Amy had finished another summer as organic tenant farmers on fertile river bottom land nearer the town village, but three floods and three lost tractors meant using this land as the primary growing space for their CSA farm operation wasn’t possible to continue. The CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) generates funds from shares purchased before the growing season begins and pays for all the seeds and production costs and any wages with shareholders receiving a generous portion of whatever food is produced each week.

Amy now has an extraordinary garden and two hoop houses next to their home in one of the few arable spots on their large property and the garden is surrounded by fenced in sheep and chickens. A large white Great Pyrenees dog named Basque keeps all the critters and family safe. Cattle are kept in a neighbor’s field. High bush wild blueberry bushes are everywhere around the house and on the edges where the field meets the forest. Amy and Wes also have a garden dedicated just to fruit bushes where raspberries and gooseberries and other berries grow.

This summer, Amy decided to not have apprentices and to focus on the kids and another big masonry project, a communal oven. After building the heater and cooker and having Mike finish the chimney, Albie cajoled Amy into attending the second annual Kneading Conference on sustainable grain growing, artisan breads and wood fired ovens in Skowhegan, Maine. She loved what she learned at the conference and began dreaming about building an oven, perhaps an oven that she could share with her community.

For a couple of years, Amy dreamed and schemed about the wood fired oven and also worked on defining what her community actually was and eventually realized that the community that she wanted to serve with an oven would be her actual neighbors on Cattail Road. On Cattail Road there is also the Shalom Retreat Center and she met there an entrepreneur (Peter Britton of Brick Ends Farm) from the Boston area with a successful business of recycling organic materials into compost. People pay Peter to take away their compostable waste and then other people pay him to buy his compost. Like others who realize that all the right things cannot be done by one person alone, Peter saw that Amy’s dream was something that he wanted to help realize so he offered to sponsor the oven construction costs for Wes and Amy. This makes Peter an oven angel.

By the time Albie arrived for his second masonry visit, Wes had a large thick concrete floating slab in place along with a concrete block foundation and capping slab. After unloading tools, oven core and insulation and oven grog for additional mass and “insulation” below the hearth and around the oven, a local building supply company delivered solid concrete blocks, cored blocks and mortar and Portland cement on Albie’s hastily assembled materials list.

Everything was stored outside on pallets under large waterproof tarps and plastic. Rain and severe thunderstorms every day slowed our pace a bit. During one particularly strong storm, Albie and Iris saw and heard the crackling lightning strike what appeared to be the center of the garden outside, so close did it seem. But when Wes arrived home later that night, he reported that a ten inch diameter cherry tree three hundred yards up the driveway had been struck and exploded by the lightning with long shards of the tree flung all around it on the ground and into the forest. A smaller maple tree in close contact to the cherry tree with trunk touching trunk had emerged from the strike with no damage what-so-ever. We visited the shattered cherry tree several times and brought back pieces to treasure and whittle on from the “lightning tree” and Wes contemplated cutting a section of the trunk for a bam that could be set as a lintel in the stone work over the wood box opening. This is work on the rock veneer that will happen after Albie left.

Peter also loaned a nicely reconditioned John Deere tractor with a bucket to help with the construction project, but with the very wet weather, the tractor didn’t want to start on cue, and when it did start, had little power to move. As a result, Wes spent a lot of time tinkering on the tractor, but still could not press it into service to gather rocks from their piles at the top end of the field. Wes started up an older tractor of theirs and hooked up a little utility trailer and was able to move materials from the drive to the oven slab.

Albie ran his big wet diamond saw for cuts off of the same large generator that they had used during the previous masonry heater and cooker visit. Mike joined us for parts of two days and added the skills of another mason to the mix. Family and friends helped with the rest. Above the capping slab, Albie started with a dry layout of the oven base course and hearth tiles. We marked small surplus corners on the front and larger surplus corners on the back and then laid out four inch concrete block to this reduced footprint pattern, to save on materials and to potentially provide shelves on the corners at the level of the hearth. Wes and Amy decided to add a layer of four inch solid block to the poured hearth to raise the hearth from a projected forty inches to a taller height of 44 inches. Both Amy and Wes are taller than average so this gave them a better working height while still leaving the hearth available for other shorter users.

After setting the solid block with common mortar, Albie then laid out the 3 inch thick Skamol calcium silicate insulation board above the block and trimmed it to size and recycled the spare pieces to cover the leftover bare spots. We laid the Skamol, which keeps heat from wicking down into the concrete slab dry and then built a masonry dike of block around the Skamol on the sides and rear of the oven. The additional 2 inch strips of material were secured with high temperature silicone on the front edge of the Skamol. This berm all the way around the perimeter of the Skamol left us a shallow space to pour in several bags of Terre Blanche grog as a thermal mass and additional insulation layer under the hearth.

We leveled and vibrated the grog and then started setting the hearth tiles on the grog, starting at the front and center and laying them in side by side, one row at a time, carefully leveling each tile as we went with a level and weighted rubber mallet. If a tile sat too high, we would scrape out a little grog beneath it and reset it. If it sat a little low, we would pick up the tile and sprinkle in a little more grog and reset it.

With the hearth set, we then centered and set the large two piece door opening lintel elements, positioning them far enough back on the front row of tiles to leave room for the fire box throat support element which sits just outside the lintel elements and runs flush to the front edge of the tiles.

There were three courses of tongue and groove voissoir sections to stack up in consecutive layers. We gathered all the flat-bottomed number one voissoirs first and laid them in a circle starting from both sides of the vertical angled faces of the door lintel elements. We left little gaps between each base element so that when we reached course two and three we would still have room for each segment to continue toward the keystone position without overlapping into an adjacent voissoir line.

We also centered the keystone over the dome and set it at its proper height so that we could build and fit the three tiers of voissoir segments exactly to the keystone. As in many first tries for inexperienced builders, a little adjustment to the first course placement was made when we saw that the rear elements did not fall on the centerline of the already laid hearth tiles.

Once this adjustment was made and the diameter checked to be sure that it was large enough, we proceeded without any struggle to pass up and lay the next two layers of voissoir segments.

The second tier is grooved on the bottom and tongued on the top and is smaller, of course, than the base tier of elements. The third tier has a bottom groove but no tongue as it will slide up tight against the truncated cone shape of the keystone. Where fit needed to be adjusted, light taps with a weighted rubber mallet and a trowel as a pry allowed everything to fit into place. Once the keystone is in place, the jack and supports under the keystone can be removed as the dome is now self supporting. After removing the supports Albie noted that three segments of the final course had settled slightly, so Albie reset the jack beneath these three elements and eased them up flush to the keystone and left the jack in place until the dome was “chinked” and covered with mortar. We packed folded single sheets of paper towels in any open joints, then sprayed the dome until it was a nice salmon pink.

As many as six or seven family members, masons and friend volunteers worked on the oven at any given moment. One group mixed batches of the proprietary refractory mortar and passed up yogurt containers of the wet mortar for Albie and another person to fill the voids in the gaps over the holes. Once the gaps were filled, then we poured and troweled with rubber gloved hands, the remaining mortar over the entire dome.

One of the volunteers who came and spent a few days with us was an Australian born Permaculture teacher named Andrew Leslie Phillips, who had done gardens and rock gardens in New York City for many years until his curiosity about the stone he was purchasing pulled him to the Livingston Manor area where a near by quarry provided the stone. He became enchanted with the area and decided to stay. He had a great story to tell about his early days in New Guinea working for the government as a field agent basically setting the groundwork for a take over of natural resources from the native people by the Australian government. He had lured his wife-to-be to join him in New Guinea and they were staying in a little hut in a native village when lightning struck a palm tree outside, blew up the tree, much like our cherry tree nearby, and also blew up the roots and turned over a lot of soil around the tree.

A local man came to him with a special adz shaped rock which he said was often found near trees after a lightning strike and was referred to as a lightning stone. Our friend had the rock at his home as his most prized possession but kept forgetting to bring it to show to us. On the last day, when he could no longer help and was on his way, duded up in street clothes, to teach a seminar, he drove by with the remarkable lightning stone which native people believe is literally formed in the strike and has a name the reflects the sound that a lightning strike can make like that of an ax hitting a tree. The stone was very hard, not like blue stone at all, and except for its modest size, was similar to larger stone adzes that were used for thousands of years before bronze and other metals were introduced to Asian cultures as tools. I was stunned when I was in New Zealand earlier in the year at the vast amount of stone adzes of all sizes which had been found and preserved in the Auckland museum. Some of the adzes there were made of jade and all the wood working and dug out canoes, which might be seventy feet long and carved out of a single tree trunk, were all made with stone adzes. We and the Gillingham children made several trips to our own lightning tree to look for such a stone but found none. Interestingly, when he had been living in New York city he had talked about the stone with some men from Nepal, very far away from New Guinea, and they immediately recognized from his story that he had a lightning stone and asked to see it and borrow it. When he brought the stone to the three Nepalese men, they all confirmed that it was indeed a lightning stone and kept if for several days before returning it. We all got a chance to hold it and I took photos of it to share with others.

Our little group of family and friends made trips to the cherry tree to take each a fair share of the special lightning split wood for its memories, and maybe its changed energy and its possibilities to be carved into spoons and other implements. The sense of power and mystery that an event like the lightning strike created along with the story of the New Guinea lightning stone and its eventual viewing anchored this project in a powerful magic that we would never forget.

With heavy rain coming nearly every day, and our workspace being essentially outdoors, we did a lot of maneuvering under our tarp and kept all the mortar materials dry under other tarps until we could cycle them into the project. For extra mass around the oven we mixed the equivalent weight of the oven mass itself in Terre Blanche grog with a modest amount of Portland cement and troweled and shoveled the grog layer on to a thickness of six inches, equivalent to the dome thickness itself. The base course of the extra mass began with solid concrete blocks back filled with the grog, as it is almost impossible to make such a weak wet mix stick to a nearly vertical surface.

After many layers, we built up the grog to the double thickness of the dome. With the extra mass on the oven we dropped down once again to the hearth level of the oven and using two inch mineral wool as a thermal break, started building up a solid four inch thick concrete block wall around the oven core, leaving four inches between the wall and core to laky in a double layer of two inch thick mineral wool.

Many new hands joined this exercise in block laying and despite a nervous fussiness on Albie’s part, did a nice job in laying and plumbing these soon to be hidden solid block walls. Because we were building a faceted shape around the dome, a lot of cuts were being made several feet away on Albie’s big wet diamond saw, but piece by piece, the wall came together until we reached the top. With the poor weather, the budget limitations and a stubbornly silent tractor, we did not ultimately attempt to lay any of the stone veneer around the block foundation and inner veneer wall. This, Amy and Wes decided would be a good project for the community to have their hand and ownership in. Amy felt that ultimately, her community should be her neighbors on Cattail Road, not a bunch of commuters from miles away. She wanted this to serve as a local resource. The oven would be something people could actually walk or bicycle to or drive a short distance and share skills and food and build an interdependence and heart which is so fragile and easily lost in our modern culture.

On most days that we worked with Amy and Wes and their kids and friends, some neighbor or friend would come by with a beautifully prepared lunch so that the oven crew could just keep working and be served when they were hungry. We folks from away got to meet several members of the community in this manner and also had some evening meals with special friends who came by to see our progress. One day at the beginning of the project, Iris and her young Aunt who was visiting, spent hours gathering berries and then making a gluten free oat meal crust for a fabulous berry pie which was to die for. The first pie was so gratefully received and rapidly consumed that later in the week a second pie miraculously appeared and experienced the same grateful fate. The gift energy of home schooled Iris and Roan was truly remarkable and we were also treated to Roan’s already extensive knowledge of local hawks and he preceded to do some hawk calling of his own with a wonderful hawk voice.

Communal projects of this sort are all too rare now and yet they are the fundamental glue of co-operation and heart that is the lifeblood of our connection to one another and to the local land. It was a great gift to work with Amy and Wes and Mike and the kids again and to see the oven dream come true. The rocks have been going on the veneer we assume but the oven was ready to use actually as we left with a shed roof to go over it and a class A chimney pipe section to penetrate it. There was pizza and bread and all kinds of other foods to make and a bunch of hungry neighbors on Cattail Road about to enter a new phase of their lives.

The same wonderful apprentice cabin and outhouse was put to good use again. The farm pond, which Mike and Albie hadn’t been able to use in the winter project, was used by all members of the work crew in twos and threes and fours, in boy and men’s groups and in girl and women’s groups and in mixed groups. We bucketed up water and soaped up with Dr. Bonners and then rinsed clean before entering the lovely shallow pond and then just simply basked in the beauty and peace of it all as another part of Wes and Amy’s dream came together.

My favorite part of the fair is the opportunity to have one-on-one conversations with beginner, intermediate and experts in wood fired heating and cooking in such an ideal setting. A full weekend of engaging with passerby’s while settled in next to friends and family, and a live fire in our Le Panyol got me thinking. Our Web site is much like our booth at the fair. Visitors stop in from all over the world looking for information, and probably ask the very same questions as those who stopped by our booth. So today I thought I would shed some light on these wide range of questions, in hopes they answer some of yours.

WOOD FIRED OVEN FAQ’S

1. Does this oven burn wood?

Yes, all of our Le Panyol ovens are designed to burn wood, not coal or gas. We are strong believers that nothing can compare to the “kissed by a wood fire” taste.

To achieve the cleanest, most efficient burn in both our wood fired ovens and heaters, we recommend selecting dry, well-seasoned hardwood with a moisture content of 20% or less.

2. Where does the wood go?

Using smaller diameter kindling-sized wood, we build a lattice stack near the door opening to ensure enough air can access and ignite the flames during the lighting process. Once the fire is established, we push it to the middle, then the rear. For complete firing instructions, click here.

3. Where do you position the fire within the oven?

Once we achieve a steady burn, we push the stack to the back of the oven, and wait until it starts to break down into coals. At that point, we place 2-3 pieces of wood on the fire at a time to keep the oven up to temperature for live fire cooking. We typically move the fire around both sides of the hearth to maintain an evenly heated cooking surface.

4. Does this oven cook pizza?

One of the many benefits of a Le Panyol is its versatility. It was initially designed as a bread oven, but considering bread is one of the most challenging foods to bake, it makes roasting meats, and veggies, and cooking pizzas easy as pie (no pun intended).

5. What do you mean by organic?

Le Panyol wood fired ovens are made of Terre Blanche clay, mined from a single quarry in France. This clay is all natural and completely unrefined. It has also been tested to meet all UL 2162, ULC S627-00 and ANSI/NSF 4 standards. This means, food can be placed directly on the hearth tiles because the organic properties do not denature it in any way.

All castable refractory ovens (the majority of modular ovens on the market, excluding Le Panyol) are made using some form of calcium aluminate cement, a prominent chemical additive in the refractory world. Firebrick are a blend of materials, and are the closest relative to Terre Blanche. However, firebrick’s material constituents don’t all come from the same hole in the ground. Our Terre Blanche tiles are also kiln fired which yields an earthenware product that requires none of the chemicals used in cast refractory materials.

6. How long does it take to bring the oven online?

To bring a residential oven (the model 66 – model 100) online takes between 45 minutes – 1 hour. A commercial oven (model 120 – model 250) would take slightly more, ranging from 1 – 2 hours. Once the mass is saturated with heat, the Terre Blanche clay hangs onto it.

7. What is the temperature in the oven?

When a Le Panyol wood fired oven is brought online to cooking temperature, the hearth will range between 700-800 degrees. You’ll know you’ve reached that sweet spot when the entire oven core turns white.

8.  What’s the difference in cooking time between a Le Panyol wood fired oven and a conventional oven?

A Le Panyol wood fired oven typically cooks at least twice as fast as a conventional bake oven. Meats, especially, cook in almost half the time. Pizzas will cook in 2-3 minutes. This is not true, however, for all wood fired ovens on the market. Most wood fired oven brands, if the core consists of cast refractory or firebrick, take at least 4 hours to get up to temperature. Our Le Panyol ovens take a quarter of the time.

9. How much wood does it burn?

The amount of wood a Le Panyol oven burns depends on the model and application. On average you’ll probably go through about 40-60 lbs of wood every time you burn, maybe more if you’re burning all day. However, once the fire has been established and pushed to the back of the oven, the oven comes online and maintains that cooking temperature with minimal fuel.

10. Does this oven go in the house?

Our Le Panyol ovens can be installed in indoor and outdoor applications. The turnkey model we had on display at the fair (on the left), was designed for outdoor use because it’s preassembled, and built with proper outdoor ventilation.

11. How heavy is this oven?

The particular turnkey residential oven we brought to the fair weighs about 3000 lbs. Our commercial oven cores including insulation, weigh between 4000 – 8000 lbs.

12. Does the oven come in pieces?

All of our oven core kits come in pieces for DIY or on-site installations. You do have the option of ordering fully assembled residential ovens, which are part of our signature copper series (as seen above). Our commercial oven cores and turnkey models are typically custom built on-site because of their size and maneuverability, as well as to meet local health and commercial licensing regulations.

13. Can ovens be used to heat a home?

If you’d like the ability to heat your home, and also enjoy the art of wood fired baking, we typically recommend going with an AlbieCore masonry heater including a small bake oven located in the secondary burn chamber. Our Le Panyol ovens are designed specifically for baking, not for heating. For more information on our masonry heaters, click here.

14. How often do you have to polish the copper oven?

It all depends on your personal preference. If you like the shiny look, you’ll probably want to polish the oven once a month or so. If you like the weathered, patina look, no polishing is required. We like the various colors brought out during the welding process, so we generally don’t polish the joints in the copper dome, we only polish the middle of the copper segments (as shown below).

15. Does the copper get hot?

The copper dome surrounding all of our turnkey ovens is always safe to touch. The Le Panyol core absorbs and retains all of the heat given off by the fire. The dome acts as a beautiful, weather safe shell, not only making the oven easy on the eyes, but also protecting the core from all outdoor elements.

–

These FAQ’s only skim the surface in terms of the broad range of questions we get asked on a daily basis. If you would like additional information about any of the topics above, or if you have questions of your own, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

We saw a few dark shapes off in the fields which I assumed, and was assured by John, were elk but they could just as well have been cattle, or moose or wildebeest for all the detail I could see. It was dark, of course, when we arrived at John and Shirl’s home in Gardiner and I didn’t really SEE where we were until the next morning when I realized that we were actually perched on the gravel and boulder strewn high river bank of the Yellowstone River which flowed North many, many feet below. The first range of Northern mountains in Yellowstone park loomed directly in front of us five or six miles away beyond dry and sparsely covered sloping land that gave way to trees just at the foot of the mountains. The old flat rail track on the other side of the river which ran to the Park’s Northern entrance is now idle but for joggers and walkers across the river and this line alone was the only man made flat line in view.

On the other side of the house, walking into town with the kids to school, one could see many many mule deer of all ages and both sexes in several yards clearly preferring the green watered lawn grass to the naturally brown and sparsely watered grasses beyond the river. In an effort to tame this semi-arid wilderness, residents had unwittingly invited the wild creatures into their town. I was also assured that the football field, green and watered, was a favorite gathering place for elk herds. What happened when someone wanted to play football I was not immediately told. Obviously, some kind of natural time and grass sharing system was being worked out.

Framing driveways and dooryards everywhere were countless random pieces and rubble piles of travertine stone. A motel with a steep bank across the street and a block away from John and Shirl’s house, had covered their entire steep bank with a “rip rap” of travertine stones, 30 to 100 pounds each. John pointed out travertine tailings spilling over the ridge high above the sparce settlements and homes on the opposite side of the road and said that there was a huge abandoned travertine quarry operation on top of the hill that we could drive to.

John and Shirl had not finalized their pick for a veneer for their heater. Their last heater in Adirondack, New York, had been made with field and other stones they had gathered all summer long along the road with their little pick up truck. They had laid out the rock in four panels on the floor around the heater and bench core we had built together and then had raised the four sides up one stone at a time. That owner built heater (I only helped design the system and build the core and bench layout with them) remains one of my all time favorite masonry heaters. Like this new heater, it was a see-through with glass double doors on both sides, a bake oven on one side and a big heated bench on the side away from the bake oven. I wondered if they were considering the local travertine as their veneer. I was clearly loving it. Blocks and rocks were apparently free for the taking. There were two reasons that John and Shirl suggested that veered them away from the travertine. One was the color. Shirl wanted a stone with some of the same grays and browns that she could see every day looking out over the Yellowstone. As a gifted fine artist, the color palette around her was always subtly and accurately noted and appreciated. They also felt that a light colored veneer would not pick up any solar gain as well as a darker color would. But given the huge amount of South facing glazing they have, plus twelve foot high end and rear walls, which they intended to cover with lichen covered stone veneer, I did not think that a three foot by seven foot South facing end of a masonry heater, light or dark in color, would have much impact on the total solar gain of the living space. I decided not to press the issue. I already knew from emails before my arrival that Shirl and John were leaning towards using a sandstone that they had found that they both liked. In addition, John and Shirl didn’t have any way calculated in their heads to easily turn a largish piece of travertine into a useable 4-5″ thick veneer stone for their masonry heater. Having recently come off the ad hoc field soapstone boulder sawing operation conducted last winter (their summer: March 2010) in New Zealand, the size of the available blocks seemed less daunting to me. For Shirl and John, a rail saw or six foot diameter portable highway concrete cutting diamond wet saw just a phone call away, had not entered into their imaginations and cost calculations. They had found, instead, a sandstone quarry man a couple of hours away with more than one deposit of beautiful stone. With a bucket loader or other similar large piece of equipment, he could move into his quarry and peel up huge sheets of sandstone three or four inches thick and then back at his shop using saws and hydraulic splitters, could turn it into any reasonable modular size one desired.

In John and Shirl’s original home, they had salvaged a weathered timber frame barn for their structure. For this home, John found some wonderful old long uniform lodgepole pine logs that had been part of the structure of an old rail shed and he had salvaged them for all of his posts and ceiling beams. Against this antique peeled log background with plaster ceilings and future lichen covered grey stone walls filling the vertical spaces, they had decided on the slightly more formal and subdued look of the quarried sandstone, to the more random look of any kind of field stone. This choice did not stop an Eastern States stone lover or his two Montana based workshop attendees from wanting to see the old travertine quarry and within a day or two of our arrival, Joel Adams brought me and Clint Dodge, the other attending mason, up the ridge around dusk in his four wheel drive vehicle. Riding with Joel, a hydrogeologist, who is also from the Yellowstone area, I soon learned to keep my stone formation wisdom to myself, but Joel was very gentle in the sharing of the wealth of knowledge that he had about such things.

The first time I saw travertine blocks in quantity was in the buildings of the famous Getty Art Museum on the outskirts of Los Angeles. All parking at the Museum is at the foot of the tall hill that the Getty sits on. Smooth automatic rail cars take passengers up the hill to the large cluster of buildings, terraces and gardens. No traffic distracts the viewer from the powerful impact of the magnificent stone buildings. The huge travertine blocks of the museum structures, each placed in a different vertical plane from any of its adjoining neighbors, were absolutely unforgettable. I imagined that the rock probably came from far far away like from Italy and indeed, I believe that it did. I did not know at the time that the coliseum in Rome is made mostly from travertine. I had read that it also has a huge quantity of red bricks in it.

I have worked with very old limestone blocks recycled from a long disappeared barn with only the foundation remaining in New Jersey. I have seen an inordinate number of lime kilns populating the roadsides of Blairstown in Northwestern, New Jersey. I have visited six or more of these kilns. The largest are twelve feet tall and twenty four feet long with a giant stone bowl shape on the top where limestone chinks and coal were laid in alternating layers and burned from an ignition port below over a period of many days to produce quick lime for agriculture and for mortar. The abandoned travertine quarry site in Gardiner, Montana seems to cover one hundred acres or more. At the old quarry site we found huge piles of scrap and one block with holes drilled in it and a gorgeous large set of iron feathers and wedge still stuck, rusting, in one of the drilled holes…a block that was never fully split out. We found other large quarried blocks that had never gone to market. At one point in the quarry we stood against a sheer sawed wall perhaps twenty feet tall. This wall, and the block it contained, had to have been cut with a diamond encrusted cable or “wire” saw. Two holes are drilled beneath a large block, one at the face and one at the rear side of the block. The two holes have to line up in the same horizontal plane. Where the two holes intersect, a cable can be fed through one hole and out the other end and then pulled on tensioned wheels to undercut the huge block. Once the cut is complete a third hole can be drilled down opposite the side wall hole from the top. Once the top bore intersects with the bottom shelf cut, the wire cable with diamonds can be fed through again and the vertical cut can be made. When this cut is complete, the huge block “falls” about an inch to the floor of the quarry shelf and the block is now free for further recutting and transport. Our friends at the soapstone quarry in Quebec, at Les Pierres Steatite, now use such a saw to cut out their quarry blocks. They used to have to drill many side by side holes with jack hammers to free a block, with much more cracking and damage than a wire saw ever creates.

Had I been in charge of the Getty Museum project, I think I would have lobbied hard for using the Gardiner travertine, if there had been enough of it, because of its beauty and its American origins. The Gardiner travertine came in shades of white and pink and beige. One block clearly had a blow hole from a steam vent in it, on an identical but smaller scale to the old steam vent holes looking like a beached whale head we had seen at the Boiling River hot springs a few miles away. It suddenly struck us that the same process going on at the Boiling River had previously happened here many centuries earlier. In addition, the rock seemed to contain evidence of organic forms in it, like the calcified skeleton of a coral reef. How life could co-exist in the formation of travertine depositions and boiling hot water and steam remained for the moment a mystery. We brought back in Joel’s vehicle a few choice souvenirs from the old quarry knowing that they were too heavy to carry back along with clothes and a precious few mason’s tools in a bag with a fifty-pound limit. For a mason who normally travels with a three quarter ton pickup truck full of tools, I had sent John a long tool shopping list of my needs and had packed a tiny bag inside my larger bag with a torpedo level, three carbide tipped tool bits, three trowels, a grinder blade, a mason’s ruler and my favorite diamond covered grinder blade, dust masks, ear plugs, glasses, and a small nylon weighted hammer.

Deep below Yellowstone Park are fissures connecting to the molten lava far below. The lava works its way up through the cracks to a point where it encounters calcium rich ground water and sends this water under pressure up through more fissures and steam vents in the ground. Old vents are constantly closing and new vents are constantly opening. This is a dynamic process. Witnessing the changes makes one wonder about the uniqueness of Old Faithful which has kept a reasonably steady schedule now for hundreds of years.

In our masonry heater we used quick lime in our mortar mix and we used a wonderful insulation block made in Denmark called Skamol (Ska=Scandanavia   Mol=Insulation) made out of calcium silicate. Like the calcium carbonate travertine rock formations, the manufactured calcium silicate block insulation is full of millions of tiny holes. The calcium forms the skeleton around the holes. It is the air trapped within the skeleton which plays such a big role in insulating the mass above it. In our own bodies, our skeletons and bones are also constantly being worked on until we begin to lose calcium. Our bones, like the travertine and the Skamol board, are also full of holes, with our own body’s life building fluids moving around in them. My brother, Howard, for years worked as a senior scientist for a firm in Wisconsin called Lunar which measured bone density with sound waves. This equipment came to be used around the world.

I learned from John that he had built his previous heater and the foundation for this heater using only Portland cement and sand. Lime added to the mortar gives it more plasticity and flexibility and setting time, but John’s own evolution in isolation as a heater builder had not produced any problems for their earlier heater or for this foundation. His experience provided us with a good lesson of how following an independent evolutionary path can sometimes produce good results.

One evening after work, when Clint went off again to the Boiling River Hot Springs, Joel Adams and I drove a bit further into the park at dusk for Joel to show me the living travertine formations at Mammoth Hot Springs. Ready for winter, about to rut elks were everywhere taking over the lawns of the buildings at Mammoth Hot Springs. Large bulls were few in numbers but each had generous harems of cows and calves in their care. The green grass lawns, not the tourists, the cameras, or cars were the attraction for the elk. They put up mostly with all of this nuisance for the grass but would occasionally push a visitor into one of the buildings if the mood struck them. Orange vested Park Rangers posted themselves near a pair of sparing bulls to keep the people away from the action and to protect all the players. The gift shops in the park are full of gorgeous wildlife photos of elk and grizzlies and buffalo and wolves for hundreds or even a thousand dollars or more, so all of my snapshot efforts, by comparison were a little silly. On a drive back one night through Mammoth Hot Springs after dark, we found the big elk that John had been looking for but my camera, without a red eye mini blink, made basically a wild guess as to what I was shooting. Only digital enhancement could make a real photo out of the image. So much for my efforts to document a big bull elk. John Stacy told me of a hike he and Shirl had taken within view of their home and within the park. There on the high plateau were hundreds or thousands of elk antler drops.  All of them belong to you and citizens such as me, and every antler is illegal to remove. Just seeing such a boneyard would be enough of a gift for me.

At dusk at the end of an October day in Mammoth Hot Springs, the crowds have thinned out considerably. On the boardwalks snaking around and through the hot springs there is a German couple with their beautiful daughter. A Japanese photographer with a tripod is carefully crafting some memorable shots. I am quietly overwhelmed by the beauty and magic and mystery and wonder of what I am seeing.

Terraced growing deposits of travertine stone are everywhere covered with steam and a thin sheen of rippling moving water that has emerged deep from within the Earth. It is also a ghost land of sorts. Trees give way to the heat and die but stand as skeletal sentinels where they once in turn grew. But the stone is not the white or grey or pink stilled travertine that we saw in Gardiner. Here, the living deposits are teaming with heat loving algae and bacteria giving a huge array of living sherbet colors to the soft fountain displays in front of our eyes. Now I can see why some of the rocks I picked up at the Gardiner quarry above John and Shirl’s home seemed so full of life. They had been alive. They were formed with living creatures fully participating in their manufacture. Calcium rich water deep in the Earth comes to the surface as a steam and these creatures live in and on this water and in and on this stone as it precipitates out as calcium carbonate.

We stood mesmerized alone at one twenty or thirty foot diameter breast shaped mound above. From atop the mound, a clear, very warm liquid bubbled out and shimmered and rippled down the flanks of the mound, sighing and whispering as it moved. From her fire and water belly deep, deep below, this Great Mother was sending her hot fluid building blocks of life to the surface, and life at the surface was abounding with these extraordinary pastel living sherbet colors. Again, we were stuck by how the living and dying around us are combined. The trees give way to steam and rocks and algae and bacteria. Other forms of water and algae and bacteria worked in the trees when they were building their cells and leaves. This living and dying at Mammoth Hot Springs brings us mere humans to this place in droves from all over the world. Some of us are foolish enough to think that this is just another five-minute photo opportunity on the way to the next fast food steam stop, but it is much more than this. Sixty percent of the world’s thermal spring and steam vent activity is going on right here in Yellowstone Park. This is wonder, a deeply, deeply humbling wonder that we feel. What springs feed the calcium beds in our bodies? What powers the limestone in our mortar to workable lime? What form of calcium was transformed by technology in Denmark into remarkable non-toxic hand sawable insulating block? How does a masonry heater heat not only our homes and perhaps some of our hot water but also feed the waters of our hearts and souls? John and Shirl knew that it would do all of those things. They had lived with such a heater before and when it came time to leave Adirondack, New York, one of the hardest parts of leaving was to walk away from their masonry heater.

Now they have another masonry heater underway. In a region rich in basalt and travertine and sandstone, John and Shirl had chosen standstone for their heater. While I write this blog, John is finishing up the sandstone veneer. All the pleasures and comforts that they recall will come to them again soon this winter and for many winters to come in their home perched above the Yellowstone River.

Albie Barden, Master Builder and President of Maine Wood Heat Co., will be working on a stone veneer see-through masonry heater at the Cram residence in Wilton, ME during the last two weeks of October, and welcomes any interested mason (beginner, intermediate or advanced) to join in.

During the first week, Albie will explain and demonstrate the process of laying out the AlbieCore unit, along with a heated bench. The second week will be dedicated to building the veneer with stone collected from the property.

If you’re interested in attending this workshop, please call Maine Wood Heat Co. to register (207) 696-5442, or fill out our contact form for more information.

Bakers from all over the country joined together with millers, grain growers, and experts in soil and sustainable farming practices last month for the 2010 Kneading Conference held in Skowhegan, Maine. We were honored to take part, arriving each day as the sun was rising to fire up our Le Panyol wood fired ovens.

Over the past four years, we’ve seen the conference stem from a small passionate group of oven builders, bakers and local innovators, to an event that has gained national recognition.

Like a fine loaf of artisan bread, this year’s presenters, attendees and volunteers, yet again, rose to the occasion. Providing their own expertise, enthusiasm and open minds to make connections and close the gaps in our local food systems from the ground up.

Despite the wealth of technical expertise and convergence of forward thinkers, there was and always has been a very strong emphasis on history throughout the conference. Maine used to feed thousands of local residents from wheat grown in Somerset County back in the 1800’s. Now less than 1% of the demand is grown here on local soil. Yet, there are still doubts that there is enough of a demand to support wheat growing as a viable enterprise, especially for the small farmers who don’t have the capital to invest in the equipment and resources required for planting and harvesting this finicky, yet fundamental crop.

The conference therefore lends itself as a support
network – soil experts supporting farmers, farmers supporting millers, millers supporting bakers, and bakers supporting oven builders – full circle, from seed to loaf.

With this type of movement, along with other developments like the newly renovated grist mill and local foods grocery in Skowhegan, we have a shot here in our hometown to close the gap between our bakers who yearn for wholesome Maine grains, and our farmers who need their wheat processed in order to bring to market.

After walking away from the conference, we all get a sense of renewed hope and enthusiasm. By strengthening these networks, we are revitalizing our local and agricultural economies, making greater strides toward a more sustainable future.

…meanwhile, eating really delicious bread.

All of us here at Maine Wood Heat Co. are getting “fired up” about this year’s Kneading Conference and Maine Artisan Bread Fair coming up July 29^th – 30^th. The countdown has begun, the schedule is set, the presenter’s are lined up, and the ovens are ready to be lit.

This year, the conference will be held at the Skowhegan State Fairgrounds, the nation’s oldest continuously running fairgrounds since 1819. It’s only fitting, considering the fact that the conference, in part, is a celebration of the region’s history – a place that, during the same time period the fair began, relied on local wheat production to feed hundreds of thousands of people on a yearly basis.

The Kneading Conference and Bread Fair are a celebration of a revival not only in Skowhegan, but also nationwide. There’s a growing energy and support for local agricultural initiatives, slow food, whole grain production, and sustainability. This is a cultural movement in which farmers and growers are regarded as leaders in innovation, bakers are welcoming local whole grains with open arms, and slow local food is being savored by all who embrace it.

These schools of thought are not new, but the recognition and widespread support are giving a whole new meaning to an event like this. It’s real, it’s happening, and we are all a part of it in some way, shape or form.

Workshops at the conference will be centered on artisan bread and pastry baking, small farm grain cultivation and milling, concepts and techniques for baking with a live fire, and learning how to build a wood fired oven.

The Maine Artisan Bread Fair, held on July 31^st, is free and open to the public. Stop by and try the finest traditional wood fired breads, see first-hand grain planting and harvesting equipment, exchange seeds, find artisan baking tools or books, and enjoy good local food and music.

If you are interested in a wood fired oven for your home or business, these events also offer a great opportunity to get a closer look and to even try our Le Panyol ovens first-hand. When you arrive, ask for Albie, Scott or Cheryl Barden, or just head towards a copper oven. They are hard to miss!

Visit www.kneadingconference.com to register. We hope to see you there!

Heikki, although trained as an architect and also working as the editor of a Finnish magazine called Muoto (Form) started with a research interest in masonry heaters and then became much more deeply involved with masonry heaters when he formed his own small manufacturing and design company in Finland called Tulisydan Oy. For the past fourteen years, Heikki has been the head of the masonry heater organization in Finland and for the past decade and longer Heikki has been working to refine the design of a mason friendly, user friendly, relatively low cost, high efficiency, clean burning firebox cassette and core system which anyone could use and from which expect excellent results. Recently, Heikki produced ten units of his design as a pre-production prototype run and sent two of these units to the States. One was to be built and displayed and fired at Wild Acres and one was to be sent to an EPA approved testing lab in Washington State for emissions testing.

At Wild Acres, we built up the cassette core in two days with several professional masons in attendance and then started firing the unit. Heikki immediately noted from the large amounts of moisture boiling out of the ends of the logs that the wood was not dry. Given the short time of the Wild Acres event, we knew as well that we would have to burn the unit very aggressively to dry out the clay mortar in order to create an atmosphere in which the unit could burn cleanly and well. Once we were able to dry out the unit itself and find better wood, we were able to get the unit to burn much more satisfactorily. No fewer than seven other projects including three other heaters, a cooker, a bake oven and a smoker and a “rocket” Contraflow heater were also being built in a workshop format, so the attendee population was widely dispersed around all of these projects during the event. A cleaner burning and cooler burning masonry smoker was built and used which grabbed the attention of everyone there along with the annual building of a bake oven which produced pizzas for the annual outdoor party in the work area at the end of each Wild Acres session.

Heikki also gave a ninety-minute PowerPoint presentation on the history and state of the art of wood burning and masonry heaters in Finland. With handheld cameras, the presentation was recorded on video and will likely be available through the MHA Web site in the future. Before his presentation, I was unaware that Heikki has fifteen different wood fired appliances at his summer cottage in Finland. These include indoor and outdoor ovens, saunas, fireplaces, cookstoves, etc. His curiosity and need to perfect a way to burn wood cleanly and well have clearly been a driving force in his life for a long long time.  I also learned from Heikki that he advises against storing wood inside the home as he is concerned about the mold that can dry out on the wood fuel and enter the house atmosphere and affect children’s health. He advised that wood should be split and immediately put under cover in an outdoor well-ventilated wood shed and then brought into the home as it is needed. It is clear that the wood species available in Finland are primarily white birch and softwoods, more prone to quick rot than many New England hardwood species, but his input was significant and welcomed.

The first half of his presentation was historical and cultural and the second half of his presentation addressed the more technical questions and challenges of our times.  He described clearly the problems of particulate emissions and how to work to lower the emissions of both large and ultra fine particles. He described in detail how wood burns and gasifies and how it is necessary to capture and burn the gases in a manageable and clean way and then presented graphs and drawings showing how Contraflow heaters were once built and how his new research is showing how they should be best built today for maximum efficiency and lowest particulate emissions.

The current design he has worked out uses a thick inner heat exchange wall and a thick slightly separate outer or veneer wall with a total wall thickness of close to 10 inches. He pointed out that in a well-insulated modern modest Finnish home, that such a heater can be fired once a day every other day and keep the house toasty and warm. Americans are not yet building such modest high efficiency homes in great numbers but it was hopeful to see from his work, how a high efficiency system such as the one he has developed as a core, could be adapted to work cleanly and efficiently in our current North American house designs. Particularly impressive was a graph that showed a nearly unchanging steady stream of heat output over a twenty-four hour period when using one of his designs.

In addition to a long history of masonry heater designs, Heikki also showed us photos and told stories of several commercial artisan bake ovens that he had built, many in a workshop format, throughout Scandanavia. One of the ovens, which he designed and built in a workshop format, he described as a two-tier Finnish Contraflow design. The fire is lit in the afternoon and burns until it is out two or three hours later. The heat is stored in the mass and evens out over night. The baker comes in the next morning and then bakes all day long, doing as many as seven loads of bread. Heikki said that this Swedish oven can bake 500 kg of bread from one two hour firing of 70 kg of wood.

After Wild Acres, Heikki stayed a day with Tom Trout and then flew out of Ashville to Washington. Albie drove twelve hours to New Jersey and left his fully loaded truck there and then flew out of Newark to join Heikki and Tim Seaton in Spokane and Colville, for a week of testing at Ben Myren’s lab. The first core was packed up and crated for a rest in New Jersey and then came home to Maine with Albie where at some point in the future we hope to reconstruct the system for our crew here and do some more testing with it.

This trip, I predict, will prove to have been a very important trip for the future of masonry heaters in North America. His contributions here and in Finland have been very significant and we are very grateful that he agreed to spend another two weeks with us here in the States during this past April. Keep your eyes peeled here and on the MHA Web site for news about Heikki’s video recorded presentation and look as well for an informal report on our testing experience in Washington State at Ben Myren’s lab.