my family built an earthen oven and it was really a fun fun process and we're really excited about cooking breads and stews and beans and all kinds of things in this earthen oven and so the first thing that we did was we built this platform and it took about 40 bricks their fire brick but you could build this on the ground I mean it's just not a hard thing to do but we wanted a more permanent structure so that we could continue to bake outdoors with it because the heat is so great it holds heat in there for 24 hours so it's pretty neat the first thing we did after the form was built is that we got a piece of chalk and we built an outline of what the structure was going to look like and then we built a sandcastle practically and everybody just had so much fun with that the thing to remember when building your sandcastle is that the height of the entrance needs to be sixty to sixty-five percent of the height of the top of the oven after we built our structure with sand we put wet newspaper on top of that all the way around kind of like a paper mache type project the kids and I had a great time mixing up the next part of the structure which was two parts and to one part clay and a little bit of water and you make it just soft enough to where you mold it and it doesn't fall apart and then you put about three inches of that on top of the sand and you let that dry for just a little while Oh yesterday we completed the first layer of our earthen oven today is dried out a little bit and we have etched the whole surface so that this layer will adhere better to the earthen oven this is our last layer and so we're going to add a little bit more strength by adding some hay to the mixture of sand and clay the ovens been drying for about a month now it's time to make some bread