WEEK
50
Cracked

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time.
—Stephen Wright

Beep-beep-beep-beep.

Oh, no. I couldn’t believe it. Was I having déjà vu?

Beep-beep-beep-beep.

The word “Probe” flashed on the oven’s instrument panel, although I wasn’t even using the meat probe. I turned off the oven. Still, the beeping continued.

Anne came into the kitchen and glared.

“Five hundred fifty,” I volunteered sheepishly before she could ask.

At least this time, when oven number two cooled down, it stopped beeping and was still usable—as long as I stayed under 475 degrees—which was a good thing, because not only was I down to my last oven, but it turned out that this oven was making better bread than the oven I’d destroyed. I hoped to keep this one for a very long time.

Anne was baking a meat loaf a few days later, when she noticed something odd about the glass window set into the oven door. “How long has this glass been cracked?” A thick fissure ran the entire length of the window, most likely a result of cold water from my plant mister striking very hot glass. I would never use a mister again, switching to pouring a cup of water into a preheated cast iron frying pan set below the baking stone. As it turned out, this worked better, anyway. Still, the damage was done.

Anne asked if we could replace the window in this twelve-year-old oven.

“I doubt it.” I pointed to the brand label: FD.*

It so happened that we had a tax meeting with Anne’s accountant the next morning, during which I was ruing the fact that my bread baking had destroyed two ovens. His jaw dropped when I mentioned I’d been preheating to 550 degrees.

“But the thermostat goes up to five hundred fifty!” I protested. “Why would they let you set the oven to five hundred fifty if it destroys it?”

“The speedometer on my wife’s Saab goes to a hundred fifty,” he shot back. “That doesn’t mean she should drive that fast!”

Good point.

All this oven carnage reminded me that, with winter fast approaching, I had a half-finished clay oven in the garden. With the gift of a rare late-autumn day in the upper sixties, it was now or never. I knew such work was risky, given my still-hurting back, but I would move carefully and take frequent rests. And schedule physical therapy for the next morning.

We had done this next part at the workshop in Maine, and it seemed fairly straightforward: Build a dome out of firmly packed wet sand, then mix up a batch of clay and sand and build up a four-inch layer—the oven wall—over the form. Let it dry overnight, cut out a door, scoop out the sand, and light a fire. According to Kiko Denzer’s book, “This can easily be completed in half a day.”

Not in my book. I started at nine thirty with five hundred pounds of purchased (I’d wised up by now) sand—more, I thought, than I needed, but I didn’t want to take the chance of running out in the middle of the project—and probably about four hundred pounds of the clayey soil that Zach and I had dug from the foundation. After completing the firebrick base, I dumped out the first seventy-pound bag of sand and started to form a dome. Soon I’d dumped out a second bag. And a third. And half the fourth, until ninety minutes and three hundred pounds of sand later, I’d finally reached the tip of the sixteen-inch stick I’d stuck in the center.

I stood back to admire my work. It was a mess, a badly lopsided hemisphere, bringing a flood of emotions and bad memories of elementary school art class. Taking a short piece of a two-by-four, I started whacking it around, pushing in the high spots, adding sand to the low, for about twenty minutes, until I finally had something that resembled a less imperfect hemisphere.

Time to mix clay. I had spurned getting my toes dirty at clay-oven boot camp, but now, on this warm November day, with an aching back, mixing by foot seemed an excellent alternative to using a backbreaking hoe. I changed into shorts, peeled off my shoes and socks, and jumped in. It was in fact quite effective—especially if you occasionally grabbed each side of the tarp and pulled it toward you, rolling over the mix of clay, sand, and water—and just a little bit fun, which I’d always suspected, as long as no one else was stepping on you. It was less fun to actually build the oven, going round and round the sand form, patting on successive inch-high globs of clay, four inches thick, working my way up the igloo, going through bucketfuls of the stuff at an astounding rate.

The sun was disappearing behind the mountains as I patted the last piece of mud into place. I lay back on the grass and closed my eyes, wondering how I ever got suckered into this lamebrain project. As much as I wanted to blame Kiko, I hadn’t been seduced by him or even the brick oven at Bobolink. I was facing a force far more powerful, one that seemed at times as threatening as it was benevolent, stronger and more enduring than anything I had ever encountered.

I’m speaking, of course, of bread.