Research

A history of the bread oven The bread oven, as we still know it today, has a very long history. The “basic model” with oven floor and dome has been around for at least 4,000 years. Bread can also be baked in other, simpler ways. Man has always been inventive in his preparation of food. Depending on his lifestyle and the materials available to him, he baked bread in a clay pot on an open fire, under a movable bell-shaped vessel, or in a temporary or a fixed oven construction. The “oven” has been around for thousands of years. Archaeologists have found remains of prehistoric ovens in many places around the world. Archaeological traces are sometimes difficult to recognise, however. Often only the substructure of the oven remains, and you do not know what the walls or dome looked like. Sometimes you still find part of the content, and you can thus determine what was baked in the oven. Because food remains do not preserve at all well, it is almost impossible to prove that an oven was used...

Types of bread translation under construction To the way which type of flour is used There are countless types of bread. Hence, we will only describe the most well known and most typical types in Belgium. The type of flour that is used determines the type of bread. We can identify two major groups: wheat bread and rye bread. Wheat and rye both give different types of bread, depending on how much the meal has been sifted. The sifting of the meal is also called “bolting”: the flour is separated from the bran to get a fine white flour. With wheat meal you can get wholemeal bread, brown bread, white bread and luxury breads. With rye meal you get rye bread, also called horse bread or black bread. A lighter brown bread can be obtained from bolted rye flour. At the start of this century, wheat bread was a luxury that only the rich could afford. The ordinary people ate rye bread or bread made from barley and oats among other things. Traditionally, white wheat bread is considered to be the best...

Other uses of the bread oven In addition to baking bread, the heat of the oven was also put to other uses: tijdens of na het bakken van het brood werd er ook plaats voorzien voor het bakken van vlaaien, peperkoek, appelbroodjes of andere lekkernijen voor de kinderen. men droogde in de nog warme oven peren, appels en pruimen. Om te drogen zijn de harde perensoorten goed zoals trichter- of hereperen, langeloren, korsenijsperen, spineelperen, dikstaartperen. De peren worden in verscheidene keren (4 à 5 maal) gedroogd. Daarna zien ze er zwart en vol rimpels uit. Bakpruimen werden als laatste in de oven gedroogd, soms op bruin papier. Om barsten tegen te gaan mocht de oven niet warmer dan 60° C zijn. op het ovengewelf werd het zaaigoed voor de moestuin gelegd. In de oven werden kleine veldvruchten en zaden gedroogd: erwten, bonen, klaverbollen, koolzaad, raapzaad, enz. in de bijna afgekoelde oven kon men pluimen drogen die, wanneer ze mals genoeg waren, gebruikt werden als vulling voor matrassen...

How many loaves of bread do you want to bake in your oven? Before you start building your bread oven, you will first have to choose how many loaves you want to bake in one session. This is important for the measurements of the oven. The MOT designed a building plan for a good functioning oven, based on data from literature (see bibliography). We opted for a smaller bread oven in which you can bake about 8 loaves of bread (diameter approx. 25 cm; approx. 800 gr) in one session. Measurements of the oven ( from VANDENDAEL: 274):

Making concrete and mortar This text can only be consulted in Dutch.

Preparing the covering loam This text can only be consulted in Dutch.

Heating the bread oven

Zemstweg 5, Grimbergen, Belgium