An Ancient Roman Oven

I apologize for the slow start of this blog; library and archives school is stunting my baking education until April.

In the meantime, I'd like to start a series on ovens. The modern, North American oven is not ideal for baking, even with a baking stone. One day, I would like to construct an outdoor bread oven and experiment with a wood stove indoors, though this is not likely to happen anytime soon. I can still do some research in the meantime, so here I will post photos and videos of interesting and different ovens.

This is a video taken by tourists of an ancient Roman oven found in Pompeii. If you pause about the 1 minute mark, you'll get a good shot of the oven, which I'm guessing was a community oven, where people made their own bread, brought it to the oven for the person in charge to bake, and picked it up later. It looks quite large and seems to be part of a larger building: Pompeii Bakery

Enjoy!

(I do not own or have any rights to this video)