Clay Oven Environments

If you want to cook restaurant-quality roast chickens, bake breads and pizzas like a pro, brown gratins with marvelous glazes, you must create a clay environment in your home oven to simulate an old-fashioned brick oven. This is done by outfitting an ordinary electric or gas oven with some sort of unglazed heat-absorbing ceramic. There are several ways to accomplish this, ranging from relatively expensive to quite cheap. However you do it, there is a major trade-off: energy.

Baking in a simulated clay oven will take from thirty to sixty minutes longer than normal to achieve the desired oven heat. On the other end, you can oft en turn off the heat sooner and let the dish finish cooking in the receding heat concentrated in the tiles, akin to the old way of cooking gratins and long-cooked stews that were transported to a local baker’s oven and then moved about in the receding heat until, in the case of gratins, they became beautifully glazed or, in the case of stews, cooked till rich and thick.