Lifelong camping enthusiast Jessica Perry is hoping to inspire others with her love of the outdoors, by creating a series of earth ovens capable of cooking up a pizza in under three minutes.
Artist and sculptor Ms Perry, who lives at Blickling, first heard about the ovens eight years ago through camping contacts and, keen to learn more about their promise of a fun, sustainable and highly effective way of outdoor cooking, she decided find out more.
'I have always loved campfire cooking and this seemed like the next step,' Ms Perry explained.
'Earth ovens are simple, they can be built for next to nothing and they work incredibly well.'
After perfecting her building technique, Ms Perry went on to run earth oven projects at a number of Norfolk schools and, last year, teamed up with Holt Hall environmental and outdoor learning centre.
Through its Roots and Shoots scheme, she began to run earth oven building workshops for families and community groups.
Under Ms Perry's guidance, workshop members construct a circular brick and flint wall which is filled with rubble before being topped with a flat, heatproof base made from engineering bricks.
A cooking dome is then moulded from builders sand soaked in water and this is covered in three layers of cob – a mixture of clay, sandy soil and straw.
Once the oven is finished, workers can fire it up with hardwood collected from the hall grounds and enjoy the fruits of their labours – an earth oven-cooked pizza lunch.
Ms Perry, whose previous projects have included commissions for Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, a collaborative patchwork made by 300 people and large scale land art on beaches at Happisburgh and West Runton, has catered for a number of outdoor events using the ovens – including a wedding where guests eschewed the traditional sit-down meal for a feast of outdoor-baked pizza.
'I can feed about 100 people with an earth oven and I have made over 50 pizzas in three hours,' she said.
'The lovely thing about it is that building an oven is such a nice, sociable thing to do and it is just a great way of enjoying being outdoors.'
Jessica Perry will be running an earth oven building course at Holt Hall on September 14 from 10am-3pm. For more information, or to book a place, phone 01263 735013.
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