Earthen Oven for our Outdoor Kitchen: the ‘Stoven 2’

Reader Contribution by Kyle Chandler-Isacksen
Published on June 24, 2015
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With the outdoor cooking season almost underway here in Reno it was time to rebuild our Stoven.  About three years ago I created a rocket stove/cob-oven hybrid (see blog post here) to meet our summer food cooking needs.  We live without electricity and fossil fuels at our Be the Change Project and when we can’t or don’t use our Sun Oven we fire up the Stoven.

For three years our original Stoven was great – it performed well and generally aged well.  It was made mainly of cob with some firebrick used in the burn chamber.  My impetus for making this second version was threefold: First, to make a more durable model; second, to add a water heating cooktop; and third, as part of an overall redesign of our outdoor kitchen.  

While the first Stoven aged well overall – the exterior was perfect (and protected under a roof) and the interior dome showed no damage from three seasons of firings – the shelves which held the grill grate had worn away considerably on both the front and back of the chamber.  This caused the door to fit poorly and made it more difficult to place and hold the grate once the fire was burning.  Now, admittedly, I could have simply mixed up a little cob and repaired the area and gotten years more use but that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun as making a much better Stoven and more functional outdoor kitchen.  For this new-and-improved model I incorporated much more firebrick including for all of the grate-holding surfaces.  I had about thirty salvaged bricks left over from my mini-masonry heater project (including halves and pieces) so I used them to build the interior frame of the new Stoven.  The halves and chunks were great fillers (along with regular old red bricks) which save a lot of cob and mixing.  

Construction

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