Cooked On Education

Tags: 2012, Apple, Chris Lehmann, Education, iBooks, iPad, MacBook, textbooks

Wow.  I must be mellowing in my old age.

Recently, my school switched DNS servers to Open DNS.  Now if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry.  I don’t completely understand it either, but what’s important is that it gave our IT guy a bunch of new filtering toys tools to control what gets in and out of our firewall.  In other words it gave him a chance to really muck things up!  After he started shutting stuff off websites would load with no graphics or images, and entire sites would show up as “Blocked by Administrator” even though he swore he hadn’t blocked them.

It was like this for lots of stuff on the web.

Now I understand the need to filter some of the stuff at school.  Especially at my school, where students are not allowed any unauthorized contact with the outside world.  But my school has always had a relatively progressive policy with regard to teacher access.

Until this week.

So back to the whole mellowing out thing.  Did I go to the IT guy all fired up, ready for a frontal assault, demanding changes?  Did I go to the Principal and complain (loudly) that the IT guy was ruining the access for all of the teachers?

Nope.  I waited.  I sent a couple of emails and screen shots of affected sites.  Then this morning the IT guy and I sat down and we solved it together.

It turns out he had blocked all traffic from an outfit called Akamai.  I had seen the name before, but I thought they were just an online ad company.  A big part of their business is actually mirroring content for a lot of the companies that are on the internet.  This means that when you go to www.apple.com, some or all of the information is actually sent to you from Akamai’s servers.  Block them and you block a big part of the internet.  He and I both learned something new.

My school’s IT guy unblocked Akamai and the beautiful, dynamic web was back.

I need to practice this patience thing more often.

I had the opportunity to attend the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan, Maine this past Thursday and Friday.  This is a conference that:

… brings together farmers, novice and professional bakers, and earth oven enthusiasts to explore the art and science of growing and milling grains and baking artisan breads. The purpose is to revive the practice of locally crafted bread, from seed to loaf.

I really enjoyed the conference.  It was the first time in 8 years as a Culinary Arts teacher that I have been able to attend any type of professional development that was related to my specific field (and not just education in general).

I have always been interested in wood-fired baking, but I have never had the opportunity to work with a wood oven.  When I saw that there was a workshop on building a clay oven, I knew that was where I wanted to go.  I was not disappointed.

The workshop ran all day on Thursday.  The workshop was run by Stu Silverstein.  According to his bio on the conference web site, Stu “is an artist who bakes a lot of bread, builds earth ovens, and writes about the process.”  I also found him to be a great teacher.  I understand that it takes having a group of people that are not afraid to get their hands dirty (literally), but within 5 minutes of starting, Stu has us all engaged and working to build an oven.  Now that is my kind of workshop: hands-on!

What follows are my notes from the workshop (my comments are in all caps):

Building a Clay Oven with Stu Silverstein

-It is important to insulate the base of the oven
-Perlite base is a better insulator

-For base, mix 6 parts perlite to 1 part portland cement

-With the perlite base, you want to use as little cement as possible, because the cement becomes a heat sink

-different materials can be used as a base underneath the insulated oven base: stone, rock, granite slab, cement block

-For oven floor, fire brick is best, but red brick can be used -The terms “floor” and “hearth” are synonymous
-To make a great pizza, it “needs to be kissed by fire.” This is not true with raised breads.

-When laying out the fire brick, you want to put the best, smoothest surface up-If there is a ridge in the layout of the brick, you want it to go downhill(away from the door) so that you don’t dingyour peel as it slides in.

-Once bricks are set for floor, find and mark the center point, not including the tongue bricks in front

-Use a catenary arch to help get things symmetrical
-generally, bread/pizza ovens are 14-16″ high

-if you take care and don’t ding the oven by throwing wood in etc. and you keep the oven covered, your oven can last for years.

-Use all-purpose sand from Home Depot etc.

-As you are building, it is important to keep the sand wet
-”I am not a mason, I am an artist who likes to build ovens and bake bread.” – Stu

-Fire bricks are only available from a masonry supply

-you can have an oven built for 15-20 thousand dollars or you can build a mud oven for next to nothing- there is no baking advantage

-Building this kind of oven can be a community event, everyone can become involved
YOU COULD GET A GROUP TOGETHER, AND MAKE IT A DAY: COME AND HELP BUILD AN OVEN AND WE WILL BE EATING PIZZA BY LATE AFTERNOON

-The oven we built is 22.5″ diameter and 15″ high

-Once the basic shape is set in wet sand, cover the dome with wet newspaper
-The purpose is to let us know where the sand ends and the clay begins when scooping out the sand.

-We are using prepared clay from a pottery store. A 50 lb. bag is $13. For this oven we are using approximately 1.5 bags

-Mix 3 parts sand to 1 part clay- we call this “mud”
-try not to breathe the clay dust
-Mix well with hoes.

-Start building around the base of dome with the mud
-Don’t press into the dome!
-Mud goes on 4″ thick

-Push down to get it to fuse together, not in!

-If you are planning to sell bread you want 6″ of insulation and mud so that you will get more bakes from one firing of the oven

-All mud ovens crack, don’t be alarmed when they do.

-When mixing mud, there is almost a good “swish” sound when you are getting the proper wetness.

-After mud, then insulate with perlite/cement mix, thin stucco for aesthetics.

-Adding a brick arch at the entrance can help protect against dings and cracks.

-About chimneys: an oven without a chimney is a 4000 year old design, most ancient, most traditional.

-No chimney keeps it simple. Also, a chimney is one more place for heat to escape.

-when mud is too wet, it will slump under its own weight.

-Just under 2 hours since we started and the mud is almost to the top of the dome!

-Mud can also be mixed by foot

-when all of the mud is on, use the flat side of a 2×4 to smooth, shape, and seal mud by tapping it against the dome

-Cutting the opening: ovens that work best have an opening that is 0.63 times the height of the oven. This oven is 15″ high so the opening should be 9.45″ high. (We actually went to 11″ for this oven.
-The width is 1/2 the diameter of the floor
-We made ours a bit wider to accomodate pizza at 14″

-Don’t cut the whole opening out at once, cut a smaller hole and begin to dig the sand out.

-When making the final cut, it is important to remember to make the inside narrower than the outside- angle in

-”The digging is not only hands on, its hands in!”

-2:10 “Let’s build a fire!”

-Build your fire towards the outside and then push it towards the back.

-2:11 “Who has a match?”

-2:15 “Fire!”

-When you get ready to insulate, mix mud with straw as a shelf around the opening to hold the insulation in place.

-You can use a 1/2 inch copper pipe with one end hammered flat as a bellows at the base of the fire.

-For the first firing, plan on having a large box of pine/scrap wood- you will use it.

-The base for our 22.5″ diameter over is 3′ x 3′

-4:07 “Time to get the dough.”

-4:16 dough in

-4:18 bread (pita) out

-For a small oven, you can cut a small hole in the back to vent and facilitate starting your fire.
-When baking, you need to plug this hole to help hold in the heat.

I am planning to build an oven at school.  I have a good space for it and I hope to collaborate with the Building Trades instructor at our school to help build a shelter for it.

Link to my all of my photos from the conference on Flickr.

Tags: Bread, KneadingConferende2010, Stu Silverstein, Wood Fired

Tags: #actem09, ACTEM, Marco Torres

Tags: #actem09, ACTEM, Wicked Decent Learning

Tags: #actem09, ACTEM, Marco Torres

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  tags: Facebook, SocialNetworking, online, twitter, TwitterLink

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  tags: education, projects, multimedia, design

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