Help build a better oven!
We're rebuilding the community oven at the Old Stone House!
The outdoor wood-fired oven and hearth at the Old Stone House was built ten years ago by a local Boy Scout troop. The community uses it regularly for historical cooking classes and Brick Oven Brooklyn's increasingly popular Build Your Own Pizza and Community Open Baking days. We fire up the oven, and anyone and everyone is invited to gather round the fire, cook your own food, and partake!
We would love to expand these programs at the Old Stone House. With a larger oven and fireplace we can host:
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Baking classes and field trips for local schools and the community
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More and larger Community Open Baking and Build Your Own Pizza days
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Historical cooking classes, demonstrations, and re-enactments
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Weddings, birthday parties, and other events
With your help, we can rebuild the oven and hearth on the same site as the current oven.
Properly built, insulated, and roofed, the rebuilt oven will serve Park Slope/Gowanus and the whole New York City community for generations to come!
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How can I help?
Please donate to the campaign! You can donate any amount of money you choose, and optionally donate a perk. See below for a description of some of the perks.
Just as important, you can volunteer your time to help build the oven!
Volunteer Community Oven Construction with mason Pat Manley
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Please volunteer to help build the core of the new Old Stone House community oven, fireplace, and hearth from start to finish. In the process you'll learn about masonry and brick oven construction from professional oven mason Pat Manley.
This is now a FREE volunteer opportunity thanks to successful fund-raising!
No prior masonry experience needed.
We're building the core of the oven from Wednesday, April 27, through Monday, May 2.
To sign up, please visit the Brick Oven Brooklyn Meetup page and RSVP for one or more days. Space is limited because only 8 people can work on the oven efficiently at once. So if you RSVP "yes" and then can't make it, please change your RSVP to "no" so someone else can get a spot.
Please volunteer for as many (or as few) days as you can make it, on any combination of days. The more you help, the more you'll learn!
Every day you'll get to:
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Participate in building the core of the oven and hearth
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Learn about materials, masonry techniques, and oven engineering
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Ask lots of questions and take photos of the process
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Learn from Pat's over twenty years of oven-building experience
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Hang out with Pat over beer in the evenings
Different stages of the process will occur on different days, including: groundwork, the base slab, framing the door and arch, laying the door and arch, oven insulation, and facing. We'll also be laying the fireplace and hearth. You'll get to work on different parts of the process depending on which days you attend.
You should plan to wear closed-toe shoes -- wear boots if possible -- and bring work gloves and a bottle of water. We'll provide snacks! This is an all-day event, so you should plan to bring lunch, or you can get lunch from one of the great local shops and restaurants around the park.
About the Mason
Pat has over twenty years of experience building brick ovens for restaurants, bakeries, vineyards, and backyards all over the country, and has taught dozens of oven-building workshops to beginners and professionals. And every year Pat leads Masons on a Mission to build masonry stoves in Guatemala.
Whether you want to build your own backyard oven, or work in a bakery, or just want to learn a new skill, this is a great learning opportunity!
If you have questions about the project, write to Jace at BrickOvenBrooklyn@gmail.com.
See you soon!
What's already done?
Much of the planning and design is already accomplished!
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Professional mason J. Patrick Manley from Maine will lead the construction team. Pat has over 20 years experience building wood-fired brick ovens.
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We have a finished design and blueprints for a rebuilt oven and fireplace. The design has been reviewed for engineering and suitability for the space and use cases, and is historically period-appropriate.
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Labor for key parts of construction will be volunteers from local Boy Scout Troop 310, led by Eagle Scout candidate Andrew Sapini.
When will it be built?
The construction schedule is set: Pat arrives on April 26, 2016, and core oven construction will be from April 27 through May 3, when Pat leaves.
Our volunteer team and local volunteers will finish the oven's outer brick facing over several weekends in May.
That's pretty soon, so we're on a tight schedule to finish raising funds!
Where will the money go?
The bulk of the funds we raise will pay for construction materials and Pat's time and housing during the week he's on-site leading the oven construction. Construction materials needed include:
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Over 2500 bricks for the external facing
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Special firebrick for inside the oven and fireplace
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Modern insulation to improve the oven's efficiency and usefulness
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Concrete, mortar, rebar, and other construction materials
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Handmade door and damper for the oven
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Cast-iron fireplace cranes (used for suspending pots over a cooking fire)
- Metal roof to make the oven and fireplace weather resistant, preserving them for generations to come.
Some funds will, of course, also cover the materials costs for campaign perks like t-shirts and bread.
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Let's beat the goal!
We'd love to raise more than our goal! Extra money will help us establish free oven-centric educational programs for area children, local schools, and the community, and bring in noted historians and local chefs for cooking classes and demonstrations. Some possible topics include:
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Colonial-era cooking
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How to bake your own bread
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The daily life of a Dutch farmer in Brooklyn
Extra money will go towards the firewood fund, and will support general educational programs at the Old Stone House.
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Rewards
If you donate to the campaign, we'll engrave your name on a brass dedication plaque that will be mounted on the oven itself. Everyone who visits the oven will know that you helped support it!
Depending on donation level, you will be a Friend, Keeper, Steward, Builder, or Patron of the Oven.
In addition to that, we and the community are offering lots of cool perks for different donation levels. Here are a few of the coolest:
Historical Cooking Class with Sarah Lohman
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Join one of Sarah Lohman's upcoming sold-out hearth cooking classes! For a $100 donation you can get a reserved seat in one of two classes (April 20 or 23). (Sold out!)
For a $500 donation, you can schedule a private historical cooking class with Sarah for up to six people!
In this hands-on class, you’re going to learn how to cook over an open fire. But what you’ll really learn are the primal cooking skills that will make you a better cook in your daily life.
You'll cover the four basic cooking techniques: baking, roasting, frying and boiling. While preparing a meal on an outdoor hearth, you’ll learn how to tell temperature without a thermometer, how to tell the doneness of food by using all of your senses, and how to build a bad-ass fire.
Local Brooklyn resident and historical gastronomist Sarah Lohman recreates historic recipes as a way to make a personal connection with the past. She chronicles her explorations in culinary history on her blog,
Four Pounds Flour, and her work has been featured in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Her upcoming book,
Eight Flavors, is due out with Simon & Schuster on
December 6, 2016.
The Brick Oven Brooklyn Cookbook
This cookbook will be an eclectic collection of Brick Oven Brooklyn members' favorite, famous, and infamous recipes!
From Jace's pizza dough to Yasmin's cardamom cookies, from Beth's seafood paella to Derm's three-hour herb-rubbed beer-braised pulled-pork tacos, and much more, we'll tell you how to cook these favorites both at home and in a wood-fired oven or fire. (Hint: it's always better in the oven.) With tips on firing a brick oven and how to split wood without splitting your toe.
We're assembling the book now, so please do write to us and submit your own recipe! The first edition will be self-published and distributed to campaign backers in Fall 2016.
Other Ways You Can Help
Can't spare money for a donation? No problem: there are lots of ways to help us make this campaign and the oven rebuilding project a success! You can help us get the word out, donate materials and work equipment, or volunteer your time and labor.
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Tell your friends about this campaign and share it on Facebook and Twitter!
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Know a local blogger or someone in the NYC media you think might be interested? Tell them to contact us at BrickOvenBrooklyn@gmail.com.
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Have a favorite recipe? Join Brick Oven Brooklyn and contribute to the cookbook!
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If you know a local business that might be willing to donate construction materials, please let us know at BrickOvenBrooklyn@gmail.com!
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We'll need lots of volunteers to finish the oven construction over several weekends in May. You can learn to lay bricks! Come for a day or just a couple of hours. For the schedule and to RSVP, go to Brick Oven Brooklyn on Meetup or Facebook!
Risks and Challenges
For an outdoor construction project there's always the risk of bad weather. To mitigate this risk, the Old Stone House has portable tents that we can set up over the construction site, enabling us to keep working.
The biggest risk is that we won't raise enough money to fund the cost of rebuilding the oven. If that happens, we'll have to push off the oven construction until the fall or next year, or cancel the project entirely.
If we have to cancel the project, the money donated to this campaign will go to the Old Stone House and pay for firewood for the existing oven, a possible oven reinforcement and structural improvement project, and other educational programs at the Old Stone House.
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About Brick Oven Brooklyn
In 2012, Jace and Yasmin Harker (the co-founders of Brick Oven Brooklyn) learned about the long history of communal brick ovens while on vacation in the Brittany region of France. In centuries past, it was too expensive for individuals to each have their own oven, so a village would have one large communal wood-fired oven. Several times a week, the oven would be fired and everyone from the community would gather at the oven to bake their bread.
We were inspired by the vision of bringing people together around a shared hearth, so when we returned to Brooklyn, we looked for a brick oven that hosted public events. The Old Stone House had a small but beautiful outdoor oven and invited us to use it, and that was the beginning of our monthly Open Community Baking Day!
In 2014 we started the Brick Oven Brooklyn meetup group to help coordinate and plan the oven days, and it's been taking off ever since! Now we're at nearly 400 members and growing. We recently launched Build Your Own Pizza days. If you love the idea of building community through cooking, come join us!
To learn more about the group visit us on the web:
On Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/brickovenbrooklyn
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brickovenbrooklyn
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About the Old Stone House
The Old Stone House is the conservancy organization for Washington Park and J.J. Byrne Playground in Park Slope, Brooklyn, including the Old Stone House itself: a reconstructed 1699 Dutch farmhouse that's a Historic House Trust of New York City Site. The OSH was central to the Battle of Brooklyn during the American Revolutionary War.
More than 3,000 people visit the park and the House each and every day. Our staff is small, but our reach is large as we oversee the playground, sports areas, gardens, dog run, farmers market, museum, and ever expanding education programs and cultural events both indoors and out.
For more information about the Old Stone House, visit our website at http://theoldstonehouse.org, or write to us at info@theoldstonehouse.org.
The OSH is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
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FAQ
Q: Where does my donation go?
A: All donations for this campaign will go directly to the Old Stone House non-profit, and will be designated for the new oven project.
Q: Is my donation to this campaign tax-deductible?
A: Yes! The Old Stone House is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and contributions to this IndieGoGo campaign are all tax-deductible charitable donations. If you need paperwork for tax purposes, please write to
info@theoldstonehouse.org.
Q: Can you tell me more about the oven redesign, the construction project, or something else?
A: Sure! Below are a few more detailed diagrams of the rebuilt oven. Write to us with any detailed questions at
BrickOvenBrooklyn@gmail.com, and we'll reply with answers (and maybe add them to the FAQ).
