Culture: How to Build a Mud Oven

Every volunteer varies in how much food they cook. Some eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a host family, but Joye and I choose to cook breakfast and dinner for ourselves. Not only have we had bad luck with our host families (one abandoned us, and the other passed away), but we also enjoy a diversity in our diet that is only possible when we are in charge. However, when you only have a propane stove and a small selection of seasonal vegetables at your disposal, after a while it can be difficult to come up with new concoctions. Therefore, using some leftover mud bricks that were laying around, we decided to build a new method of cooking at our site. Lo and behold, the mud oven. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Gather the necessary materials – mud bricks, sand, and… actually, that’s it.

Step 2: Put on nasty unflattering clothes and prepare to get dirty for about two weeks.

Step 3: Add water to the ol’ dirt pit out back to make some well-fashioned mud mortar.

Step 4: Build a flat, square base out of bricks about a meter and half across.

Step 5: Make a rectangular wall around the edges of the base, up to about four bricks high.

 

Step 6: Once your wall is dry and solid, fill in the base with sand and gravel, and top with mud.

Step 7: Create a mold for your oven by piling a mound of sand on the base about 1 meter wide.

Step 8: Wrap the mound in paper to help it keep its shape for the remainder of the project.

Step 9: Make more mud, but this time, add half dirt an half sand to the mixture to make it like pseudo-cement.

Step 10: Cover the mold in a layer of your pseudo-cement a couple inches thick by working your way up from the bottom.

Step 11: Let the pseudo-cement dry for a few hours, before cutting a wide door in the oven.

Step 12: A few days later, add another thick layer (a few inches) of pseudo-cement.

Step 13: When the structure is dry, pull out all of the sand from inside through the door.

Step 14: Build a fire inside to heat up your oven. The thick mud walls and sandy base will trap the heat, so that after a few hours, it should be hot enough to pull the fire out and bake.

Step 15: As an extra precaution, pay some people to come put a layer of cement over the whole thing; this will prevent the rains from destroying all of your hard work. :)

Just as building a mud oven is a process, so is learning how to cook with it. To heat it up to sufficiently hot levels, it is necessary to keep a fire going inside the oven for at least three hours! Then, you need to make sure that your dish is covered tightly, or your peanut butter cookies might end up tasting like bitter campfire smoke (sniffle, sniffle).

However, we have had success already. For my birthday, Joye baked a delicious oatmeal apple crisp for dessert. Then, a few days later, we killed, plucked, cleaned, and baked a chicken with artichokes and tomatoes to create a sumptuous dinner, as pictured above. And for the record, yes, that was the first time we’ve killed, plucked, and cleaned a chicken. :)

Moral of the story: Appreciate your gas-powered oven.

- James (& Joye)