Sheffield Born and Bread

The S2 Community Parish Oven Build and Bake Sheffield Year of Making 2016 Heritage Small Commissions Project.

There was once a tradition of communal ovens in each parish where people could bake bread. The old communal ovens were a point of focus for the community and if reinstated could once again encourage collective bread making and community cooking.

Friends of Sheaf Valley Park are very pleased to have received a grant of £500 from Sheffield Year of Making fund and intend to revive a great community tradition and reinstate the Shrewsbury Road parish oven; hand making a traditional cob oven; organising a series of real bread making classes; and opening up the oven on a regular basis for community bread baking sessions.

We plan to involve at least 20 people in making a cob wood fired oven on the edge of South Street Park, close to an original but long since disappeared Parish Oven, using clay, straw and sand and applying traditional methods, which date from medieval times.

The oven will be lit at least once per month from June to September, so that local people can bring dough they have made at home to be baked in the communal oven.

Ultimately we hope that the shared skills developed through this project will lead to other cob ovens being built in several locations in our area, so that on any weekend there might be at least one community oven being fired up where people could come together to bake in a wood fired oven.

If you would like to take part in this project, either as a participant or as an observer (or even just as an eager pizzetta eater) please register your interest by email: fosvpsheffield@gmail.com.

This will be a popular FREE event open to all friends and supporters of FOSVP so please register as soon as possible to be sure of a place and indicate which of the 3 dates you wish to attend (1 ,2, 3 or ALL 3).
Once you have registered your interest we will send you further details.

If you can’t make this event please be assured that we will let you know of other dates throughout the summer we will be firing up the oven and baking bread.

Day 1: Sunday 22 May 10am-3pm
GATHERING materials (for example digging clay, collecting stone) and BUILDING the base.

Day 2: Sunday 29 May 10am-3pm
MIXING the clay and BUILDING the layers of adobe and clay

Day 3: Sunday 5 June 10am
FIRING up the oven (takes approx 3 hours) and preparing dough, then at 1pm BAKING and EATING pizzetta (small thin versions of pizza) as part of a shared lunch.