Silverwood Oven

Minnesota Oveneers

for people who buiild, own, or use wood-fired ovens

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Radio Interview
I was interviewed on the radio on 4/13, available here.

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Location: Minnesota Oveneers / Park Oven Language: en
 

A Park Oven for Saint Paul

The Minnesota Oveneers would like to promote a publicly accessible oven where the community at large can come together and bake.

There are several park ovens around.

Some examples:

There is more information on the Quest for Ovens Park Ovens page.

Why Have a Park Oven?

In some sense, the only reason for there to be an oven in a park is that people will use it.

Fundamentally, an oven is a feature that has a cost and its cost has to be balanced with its benefits.

So, what are the benefits of a park oven?

Tangible Benefits

Based on the experience of other ovens that I am aware of, there are both some tangible and intangible benefits.

On the tangible side, a park oven is a very useful feature for allowing a large group of people to cook food together. The capacity of an oven for baking pizzas, for example, can be upwards of 20 pizzas an hour. (With proper preparation and operation, a pizza oven can make one pizza per minute.) A very large group of people can have their food prepared very quickly.

An oven is not restricted to making pizzas. The right kind of oven can also be used for baking bread. An appropriate oven could bake 12 to 16 loaves every half hour.

Intangible Benefits

A park oven lends itself to building communities.

With the commitment to build an oven in a public space comes an opportunity to create a display of public art, including art created by people in the surrounding area.

A community oven might fit with the traditions of recent immigrants, who might help use the oven part of the fabric of there immigrant communities.

What Obstacles?

There are three primary areas of concern with a park oven.

Physical Security

There is no question that security features will add significantly to the final cost of an oven.

I think the state of the art for physical security of an oven is currently the Park Avenue Community Oven. The Park Avenue oven is contained in an innovative shelter that closes securely, but opens wide for operation.

Perhaps the most compact solution I have seen to this was shown in an oven built by Harrington and Hoyle Ltd., Landscape Architects for Alexandra Park in Toronto.

They put a wrought-iron gate in front of the oven so that if you could not unlock the gate (physical security) you could not access the oven.

Fire Safety

Any structure housing fire needs to be planned to proper containment. The city fire marshall will need to be engaged in construction plans to ensure that the oven and its shelter will conform to city and state fire regulations.

Once the oven is built, there will probably need to be training in safely operating the oven.

Food Safety

The Saint Paul Parks and Recreation Department already provides public facilities for people to cook together (the barbeque grills in the parks).

A park oven is somehow viewed differently.

There are two aspects to food safety for a park oven: safe materials and construction, and safe operation.

Safe Construction

Many people build their own outdoor wood-fired ovens out of tranditional oven-building materials: bricks and mortar. Others are built using cob construction.

It’s possible, or even likely, that such a hand-built oven would not be approved by the supervising health inspectors.

The best alternative for the oven builders is to acquire an NSF-rated prefabricated oven core that can be used where the food will contact the oven, and then surround it with the thermal mass and insulation required for the oven’s intended purpose.

Safe Operation

Here again, we have the question about different standards potentially being applied for existing shared cooking facilities in a park (a barbeque) versus a park oven.

In no way do we want to put anybody at risk; however, we do need to determine what requirements will be imposed for safe food operation on a park oven.

General Issues

There are several outstanding questions that must be answered before a serious effort to build a park oven in Saint Paul can start.

  • Where should an (initial) oven be installed?
  • Should the oven core itself be built or bought?
  • How big should the oven be?
  • What kind of oven should it be?
  • How often will it be used?
  • Who will it be used by?
  • Where will the wood used to fire the oven come from?
  • Where will the ashes created by the fire in the oven go?

Many Alternatives

The problems of determining where an oven should be built and what kind of oven it should be are very multidimensional.

  • An oven in the wrong location won’t get used.
  • A clay oven is cheap but not as durable as other kinds of ovens.
  • A brick oven is durable but expensive.
  • A prefabricated oven is durable but more expensive.
  • A big oven can bake more, but takes more time and fuel to heat.
  • A small oven can bake smaller batches, but might not be big enough for the demand.
  • A low-mass oven takes less time to heat, but is not suitable for a lot of baking.
  • A high-mass oven takes more time to heat, but bakes for a longer time.

This means it’s much easier to make a wrong choice than a right one. It might only be possible to determine what the demand is by building an oven and seeing who shows up and how much there is to bake.

A Park Oven for the Twin Cities

As part of a course at the University of Minnesota, Architecture 4282, Undergraduate Architecture Studio, Marcelo Valdes and 18 of his students built an oven at Silverwood Park for use by the park. The oven was completed on May 10, 2010.

On Februray 12, 2013, I got an e-mail from Tom Moffatt, the supervisor at Silverwood Park, informing me that the oven came apart when they tried to move it during the summer of 2012. “A decision has been not to replace it since it is not core to the park’s mission.”