Timber-framed outdoor kitchen - Cathead - 1:1 scale

[Cathead]

Jack, all the wood is Eastern Red Cedar, which we harvest and mill on-farm. Its sapwood has that brilliant purple hue when it's freshly cut, but it quickly weathers to the dull orange you see on most of the structure, and eventually to grey with sufficient direct sunlight. You can preserve some of the color with wood oil, for example in this table I built from the same material (photo repeated from earlier in the thread):

 

 

Paul, beans would be an option but we'd rather plant a perennial vine that will take up long-term residence, rather than something we'd have to restart every year. That'll also speed up the shade production, since an established vine will create shade as soon as it leafs out, rather than waiting for a new vine to climb up the trellis again. And we don't want to do grapes because we don't want to draw lots of birds into a food-handling area. We have plenty of garden space and trellises for beans (we grow our own full annual supply of dried beans as well as green beans). So it'll be something hardy and flowering.

[Jack12477]

It has a beautiful color. Thanks for explanation. Gorgeous table too

[Canute]

Very nice addition to your outdoor kitchen. The wood is beautiful. The Italians call that a pergola. Will nice sitting out under this on a summer night. 👍

[Keith Black]

Eric, grape vines are nice and they provide fruit but they can get pretty aggressive. Bittersweet is a great vine that produces pretty flowers and provides berries for the birds in spring after they've had a chance to sugar over winter. 

[Cathead]

A major milestone! This week was the first since fall that we had warm enough, consistent enough weather to pour the concrete hearth that sits atop the foundation. On Monday morning, we took a break from other work to mix and pour the 6.5 bags of concrete required. As a reminder, here's how the foundation has sat all winter waiting for this moment:

 

First I cut a piece of backer board to fit snugly in the opening, and taped all the remaining seams:

I then re-checked that everything was level and adjusted the supports as needed (very little was required, it was quite tight and stable):

Then a network of rebar was laid and wired together to strengthen the concrete. These were salvaged from a dump pile on our farm that pre-dates us; they were the perfect length for this job!

Finally we started mixing the concrete by hand and shoveling it in. When we reached full, I compacted the mix and planed the surface smooth. Here I am with the finished surface, still wearing my mask to keep out the concrete dust since it's a pain to take on and off with rubber gloves on. I was thrilled to finally get that thing off, they give me headaches.

At this point, we let the concrete cure for a couple days, moistening the surface occasionally. By this afternoon, it was time to remove the wooden forms beneath and around the hearth. I started by knocking and prying away the vertical supports on the outside and inside of the structure:

And then disassembled the screwed-together form itself, revealing the hearth. We wet the newly exposed edges just in case a bit more moisture was needed now that they were exposed to air.

We'll let this cure a while longer before taking the next step, but this is major progress! We have a busy couple weeks coming up, which is convenient in this sense, then it'll be time to start assembling the oven itself atop this surface. Just a reminder, the entire outer surface of this structure will be sealed with stucco, so it doesn't matter what the edge and seams look like (of the blocks or the hearth).

 

Thanks for looking in. Hopefully updates will start coming more regularly from now on!

[mbp521]

Coming along nicely Eric. Seeing this reminds me that I really need to get started building my shipyard in the barn. I have put it off for way too long. Maybe following your kitchen progress will inspire me to get moving on it.

 

-Brian

[Cathead]

Brian, don't feel bad, I've been without a shipyard for over a year now as our DIY renovation of a spare bedroom proceeds at a glacial pace. That's another thing I hope will be back in operation by later this spring.

[Cathead]

After letting the hearth cure for a few weeks, we took the exciting next step of installed the oven dome itself. Following the instructions, we first placed a layer of 2" ceramic insulation board over the hearth, spread a layer of sand on that, then carefully arranged the firebrick cooking floor to be level and centered.

Then, with the help of some friends, we carried the ~200 lb oven dome itself over and carefully placed it over the floor.

 

The next step will be to cut the insulation board down to match the outer shape of the dome, start installing the chimney, and start wrapping the dome with ceramic insulation blanket. The whole thing will eventually be covered in stucco to seal the surface. But it's actually looking like an oven!

[Keith Black]

 Eric, I saw this YouTube vid and immediately thought of you. This is episode #3, I can't locate episodes 1 and 2, sorry. The last episode is #11, hopefully there will be further episodes and we'll see the barn come to completion. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.......KB

 

 

Edited May 9, 2023 by Keith Black

[Cathead]

Hey Keith, I somehow missed your response and apologize for appearing to ignore you! Thanks for sharing that video. If you go to the Videos tab on his channel home page, you can find all the episodes of that project back to #1.

 

I do actually have a slight bit of progress to show. Life has been horribly busy and we had to deal with a situation where it turned out that the original oven dome sent to us was defective and a new one had to be sent; to his credit the owner of the business was super forthcoming about the error on their end and made every effort to make it right. But it did cause a significant delay when we'd blocked out some time to move forward, and we've just now been able to make a bit of time to proceed again. 

 

I finally installed the chimney, which involved projecting its run up from the oven, cutting a careful hole in the metal roof, installing the chimney pipe, adding the flashing and other protective stuff up on the roof, caulking everything, and adding a brace on the inside to help stabilize the nine-foot run. A few pictures; first the view inside:

 

 

And then several from the outside:

 

 

Next we start wrapping the dome in insulation, then cover it in stucco. At that point it'll be time to start firing the oven for the final cure of the masonry before it's ready for cooking. This was a major step, though, and it really feels like an oven now! Ideally we'll find time for the insulation in the next few weeks but we're still in an overwhelmingly busy period, so who knows.

 

Thanks for looking in!

[mbp521]

Beautiful work Eric. Another step closer to enjoying that outdoor kitchen.
 

It’s nice to know there are some business owners that still stand behind their products and are willing to make things right. 

 

-Brian

[Canute]

Nice, tidy installation, Eric. And as Brian said, having a business standing by their order. Can't wait for you to do up and oven fired, thin crust pizza.

[Cathead]

YOU can't wait? How do you think I feel??? 

[Canute]

Thought that went without saying.😉 It is impressive work to date.👍

[Cathead]

Speaking of things I've been eager to do, I finally started my next scale model project, another scratchbuilt Missouri River steamboat. You can find the build log here. Thanks for reading!

 

[Cathead]

OK, nearly a month later, but we took a major step forward by completing the insulation and preparing for the stucco outer shell. The first step was to cut away the excess ceramic insulation board around the dome:

Then we started adding layers of ceramic insulation blanket; there should be a minimum of three inches all the way around. This stuff is nasty with lots of microfibers coming off that can cause skin, eye, and lung irritation, so protective gear is required. Not ideal for summer, we'd hoped to get to this before early July, but that's how it turned out. It also shreds everywhere and I spent a long time collecting fragments from across the landscape when we were done; you can see some on the concrete pad and imagine how many quickly floated off into the surrounding area. 

Once the insulation was complete, it was time to cover the insulation with a tight layer of wire mesh, to hold it down in place and provide a base for the stucco. This was a difficult job because such stiff mesh does not like to form nice spheroidal shapes. Step one was to place a screen across the whole front and wrap the rest in an upright cylinder:

This is held on by concrete screws and washers around the face and the lower perimeter:

Then we used hand and power tools to cut the mesh into strips that could be folded over the dome then secured and tightened in place by lots of wire ties.

Here it's almost done, except I haven't cut out the door area yet. It was very difficult to get the shape consistent and I don't think we succeeded entirely, but like scale model projects, at some point you accept "good enough" and realize that most people won't notice a lack of perfection.

And here it's actually fully ready for the stucco:

We weren't able to get to the stucco right away, so hung plastic sheeting around the least-protected sides to make sure any rain couldn't dampen the insulation. We're in a severe drought, but the forecast held various chances, so we took the precaution. Nothing came of it, but no harm in being careful.

 

We've actually begun the stucco now, and so far so good, but I'll share that work in a separate post when it's all done. We're letting the base coats cure right now and will do the finish coat soon.

 

[mbp521]

Loving it!
 

That insulation is some nasty stuff. You’d think with all of today’s technology and regulations they could come up with some sort of fire/heat resistant materials that were more eco & user friendly. 
 

-Brian

[Cathead]

Agreed. And the oven kit came with about twice as much as we needed, which is frustrating since it's a waste of energy to ship all that excess across the country and now we have to either find someone who would want it (time investment) or chuck it (what a waste).

[mbp521]

This made me think a little more on the topic of insulation. One somewhat eco friendly approach to insulation for your oven could have been the old-school way they used to insulate steamboat boilers. I believe I remember a post way back on either one of either yours or my builds where @kurtvd19 made mention they used horse manure and hay as a form of protection from the heat. This could tie in your passion for steamboats with your love of the outdoors. On second thought, horse manure around food, doesn’t sound so appealing. 😁

 

-Brian

[kurtvd19]

43 minutes ago, mbp521 said:

horse manure around food, doesn’t sound so appealing. 😁

Stay away from store bought mushrooms then!

[Jack12477]

42 minutes ago, kurtvd19 said:

Stay away from store bought mushrooms then!

Yep ! Keep 'em in the dark and cover them in s............

[Cathead]

2 minutes ago, Jack12477 said:

Yep ! Keep 'em in the dark and cover them in s............

Also known as politicians' attitude toward the public. But I digress...

 

Brian, it's certainly true that people have been building ovens for thousands of years without ceramic insulation. We discussed, at great length, the option to do this entirely from scratch with traditional methods. But the outcome would have been far more uncertain and we already do so many things that way. For once we compromised and bought a kit, with the inevitable tradeoffs that involves. And yes, I would pause at the thought of my pizza bearing a certain odeur de cheval. 

 

As for mushrooms, we actually do raise shiitakes and oysters, but we do them on outdoor logs.

[Jack12477]

2 hours ago, Cathead said:

Also known as politicians' attitude toward the public. But I digress...

As programmers for a major computer manufacturer,  a colleague and I used to have a ceramic mushroom on our desks. When asked what it was, we would respond that is a "programmer's flower" ..........

[mtaylor]

3 hours ago, Jack12477 said:

As programmers for a major computer manufacturer,  a colleague and I used to have a ceramic mushroom on our desks. When asked what it was, we would respond that is a "programmer's flower" ..........

I saw many of those and had one for myself in the past.  Seemed common not just with programmers but engineering types.

[Egilman]

7 hours ago, mtaylor said:

Seemed common not just with programmers but engineering types.

Sad and humorous in a way, but very true... I never owned one, but I saw a lot of them...

[Cathead]

Back on track, here's the first round of stucco freshly laid.

We've been keeping it misted when we can, and wrapped it more thoroughly with plastic to help maintain humid curing conditions.

Here it is initially cured this morning. The next round won't happen until Monday, we'll need to take some time away from work to do it, can't get to it today.

 

Looking like a proper oven, though!

[Roger Pellett]

Eric,

 

I know nothing about pizza ovens, so how does this thing work?  Where does the fire go?

[Baker]

4 hours ago, Cathead said:

Looking like a proper oven, though!

Yep 👍

 

[Cathead]

1 hour ago, Roger Pellett said:

I know nothing about pizza ovens, so how does this thing work?  Where does the fire go?

Fair question. The fire is built within the dome, heating it internally. You don't cook directly with the flames or coals (like a grill) but with the radiative heat retained in the dome. The masonry and insulation hold the heat for many hours, so once you've fired it, you can roast/bake/cook for a very long time. Potentially 8 hours or more. The rounded shape helps ensure even circulation and heating. If you build a hot fire at one end and put food in right away, you'd get very uneven cooking. Ovens have been used this way for thousands of years in various cultures.

 

Some cultures also built barrel vaulted ovens, but these are harder to cook evenly in because the heat doesn't circulate right. I know, we built a homemade version as a test case years ago and that's what happened. Barrel vaults are so much easier to make, but ours proved to us that the firing and cooking wasn't even enough and we wanted a true dome. Which is one reason we went with a kit instead of a true DIY because a DIY true dome is a lot harder to engineer, so we compromised between true DIY and a completely premade oven, which would be both far more expensive and nowhere near as satisfying.

 

The chimney carries away the heat and draft from the active fire, but once it's time to bake/roast, you close the dome off from the chimney with the metal door seen in my photo above, retaining the heat within. At that point no more air or draft is needed because the fire isn't needed.

 

To answer a related question that gets asked a lot, the space beneath the dome is not directly related to firing or baking (i.e. the fire does not get built down there). It's just empty space created by the foundation, no point in making that a solid mass. The most common use for it is storing firewood. The traditional cycle is that, once the oven has started to cool and you're done using it, the next round of firewood is placed within the dome, where the residual heat cures it extra-dry and it's ready to go. The space down below holds many rounds worth of wood out of the rain and so forth.

[mbp521]

I would be more inclined to use the kit as well instead of DIY, but I have seen videos of DIY people using exercise balls as the form for the dome. They cut a hole in a piece of plywood the size of the dome they want, inflate the ball in the plywood hole around the centerline, wrap the top half of the ball in hardware cloth then form the general shape with concrete. Once the concrete cures, they pop the ball and remove it, then slide the dome off the wood base. The kit version seems to take some of the work out of it. 
 

-Brian