Oven stone

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Bricked-up oven from the 1920s with oven stones inside and tile cladding outside

Oven stones were used as natural stones for the construction of ovens until around 1950 , after which the demand declined and there are only a few specialized craftsmen who have mastered this technique. Only special refractory rocks such as trachytes , volcanic tuffs and slag agglomerates are suitable for historical stone furnace construction . The profession of oven builder has merged with the manual profession of oven and air heating builder, who is more concerned with the construction of other ovens, such as the fireplace . In the past, the traditional oven builders were stone masons , stone masons or bricklayers and lived in the places around the respective quarries , with the most important center of oven construction in the Vulkaneifel in the small town of Bell . There were also baking oven centers in Gershasen near Westerburg in the Westerwald and Königswinter in the Siebengebirge as well as one near Pelm . The historical stone ovens are called "Old German ovens" and the bread from these stone ovens is called stone oven bread.

Demarcation

Only certain rocks are suitable for baking ovens. The natural stones that are used for the so-called "hot stones" for preparing food are not suitable . Polished gabbros (e.g. Impala ) are used as hot stones and polished serpentinite or soapstone are used to keep food warm in wood-burning stoves . Since most rocks of volcanic origin are very porous, they would lead to undesirable fat build-up if they were used as a hot stone in the preparation of food.

As natural building materials in addition to the oven bricks, clay ( oven clay ) or bricks were used for ovens .

Rock qualities

The stones used in the construction of ovens must be able to withstand the effects of heat without losing their strength or shattering; must store the heat and, as poor heat conductors, slowly release the stored heat to the baked goods. The use of trachyte , volcanic tuff and slag agglomerates, which arose from pyroclasts , is known for baking ovens . Pyroclasts are rock fragments that were created by tearing or breaking solid raw material or through direct crystallization from liquid volcanic raw material. The fragments can be whole crystals , fragments of crystals, glasses or rock fragments. The tuffs from the Eifel as well as from the Hessian volcanic area around Kassel and from the Westerwald were natural raw materials that could be used for baking ovens. Refractory and acid protection applications are still important in the region's industry today , in the field of metallurgy and chimney and chimney construction . The corresponding components are increasingly preconfigured or poured with refractory concrete on the construction site. In the past, however, you had to rely on highly specialized craftsmen who had mastered the complex masonry of oven bricks and the associated special mortar.

Oven construction

There were no construction instructions for the construction of the ovens, but the construction is based on sketches that were made on site and according to the requirements of the client. There is only a blueprint for the Königswinterer oven, an old German oven that was built from 1900. The community ovens were either free-standing or built in bakery houses .

In the stone quarries near Gershasen, plates measuring 150 × 75 × 12 centimeters and hotplates of up to 180 centimeters were produced. The stone hotplates were the most important detail of the ovens and four to six hotplates were required for a communal or bakery oven. In Königswinter, hotplates up to a size of 2 m² could be produced. Depending on the size of the oven, 50 to 120 oven stones were required for the vault. Until the 1950s, the oven stones were preformatted in the quarry with stone cutting tools and transported to the construction site and assembled by the oven manufacturers. When setting up the oven, the openings had to be individually adjusted and supported with a wooden falsework. Finally, iron flaps were fitted into the openings for the lighting and for the baked goods. The furnace builders had to pay particular attention to the expansion of the rock when it was warm and special fire-resistant mortar and joint mortar were mixed. The outside design of the oven was made with tile or brick material and by no means with oven stones.

The inside of the oven was lined with oven stones. The vault at the top with a pitch of 25 centimeters was originally built from natural oven bricks or later with firebrick . Due to the low weight of the natural oven stones, they were particularly suitable for this purpose. After the vault was completed, it was customary to carve a cross in the keystone of the furnace.

There were two types of stone ovens in the 1930s:

  • The farmer's oven , which was built with 1.10 and 1.40 m in a rectangular or square view with a depth of up to 1.60 meters and had 2 to 3 hotplates and
  • the bakery oven with 1.80 to 2.00 m in the view and with 2.40 to 2.60 but also up to 2.80 meters deep of the oven and with up to 6 hotplates. The outer walls of the ovens were up to 50 centimeters thick.

Depending on this, the stone ovens were renewed after 20 to 30 years of commercial operation.

These days, stone ovens are again being installed in bakeries, but also again as communal ovens in villages. They either form meeting places for social village life while baking together or they are put into operation at village festivals. But there are also mobile stone ovens for private use for baking bread and for making pizza.

Baking in stone ovens

Historic stone oven, bricked inside with oven stones and outside with bricks and plastered on the sides

A maximum temperature of 270 ° C is required to bake bread in a stone oven. The slowly falling heat ensures good crust properties and thus good freshness. Whole grain and rye bread are baked first, followed by mixed wheat breads later. At around 180–220 ° C, sweet doughs and cakes or, in the Westerwald, a “baking cake”, which consisted of grated potatoes, can be inserted. Likewise, in the Eifel, a “Birrebunnes” (so-called “black pear flatbread”) was baked in the residual heat, a flat cake. Then there is still enough heat in the oven to dry out the meat. It is also known to be used for one- pot dishes such as " Baeckeoffe " - and ovens with a vaulted height of 45 centimeters were built near Fulda because flax was dried there.

In front of the bread, flat goods could be baked in the first, particularly high heat, such as B. Flammkuchen.

Historic ovens are fired directly, there is no separation of the oven and fire. The furnace chamber must first be fired with brushwood and wood. After heating up, the remaining embers (today with so-called "ash scrapers") are removed, historical ovens were cleaned with a wet sack. To determine the correct temperature, four ears of corn used to be placed on a wooden bread pusher (also known as a "back lap") and moved three times through the oven in the Westerwald . If they were black, the oven was still too hot - the optimum baking temperature was only reached when they were only brown.

When the oven has reached the appropriate temperature, the bread is inserted. It is then no longer possible to change the baking temperature. The only way to adjust the baking temperature was to move the bread to warmer places. At the beginning, the stone baked bread receives the stored heat, a relatively high initial heat. This quickly creates a crust - and as the temperature continues to drop, the inside of the bread is slowly baked and a lot of moisture is retained in the bread. Today's stone oven bread stays fresh for a week if properly stored in stoneware . But there are also statements that the historical stone oven breads have kept for up to two weeks.

If the bread did not have a crust, it had to be removed and coated with a so-called "fresh whisk", which was previously dipped in water. After putting it back in the oven, the bread was baked. Holes were also made in the loaf of bread with wooden sticks to allow excess moisture to escape.

Historic ovens

Bakery from 1838 in Neckarsulm- Dahenfeld

Communal stone ovens already existed in the Middle Ages. In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, more communal ovens were built in numerous villages to promote a sense of community and to minimize resources, because it was recognized that they could save wood and minimize the risk of fire.

The oldest surviving oven from 1585 made of oven bricks is located in Zwönitz in the Saxon Ore Mountains in the local museum of the Bone Stampe in a listed farmhouse.

In Essingen today (2009) you can still see a historic stone oven in a barn, which was used for baking until 1971, and in Unter-Widdersheim you can see an oven made of Michelnau tuff . This furnace was built in 1935 and operated until the 1950s. It is put back into operation every year on the occasion of a two-day celebration. In Bell am Laacher See in the Eifel there is also a village communal oven, as well as in Königswinter - Thomasberg in the Steinringen district.

Oven construction with oven stones experienced a renaissance from 1975, especially in bakeries that paid attention to the special quality of their baked goods. However, today's stoves are built with thermal insulation and the outside hardly gives off any heat. In the past, the outside was 50 to 60 ° C warm. The oven bricks are made with stone saws by stonemasons and delivered to the oven builders on request.

Oven manufacturing centers

The most important center of baking oven construction was in the small town of Bell . There were also baking oven centers in the village of Gershasen near Westerburg in the Westerwald , in Königswinter in the Siebengebirge and a less well-known one near Pelm in Rhineland-Palatinate .

Bell

In Bell, which was the center of brick oven construction until the 1930s, it is assumed that oven stone construction from natural stones can look back on a thousand-year-old tradition. In the year 1822 almost the entire village population and in the 1920s still around 500 to 600 people of the place lived from baking ovens. The ovens were not only installed in Germany, but also in France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

The Bellerstones or women's stones that were quarried at Bell are classified as soft stones in the technical sense . They can be formatted particularly easily when they are damp and are extremely fireproof. The Bellerstein was called Beller oven stone because of its quality . The quarries around Bell are no longer being dismantled today (2009), but due to this traditional craftsmanship there are still three furnace construction companies in this location that have now specialized in industrial furnace construction, the so-called steam steel ovens .

At the Maria Laach Abbey , a stone oven with a walled cross-section can be seen on a stone path not far from Bell.

Bell's secret language

The Beller oven builders spent 3 to 4 days or one to two weeks on construction sites, depending on the size of the oven and the number of workers. In order to prevent others from imitating the Beller furnace construction, they developed a secret language in order not to divulge their knowledge. This secret language is called Lebber Talp . The base, the so-called hotplate, on which the stove is baked, is called Talp . The oven stone itself was named after its occurrence Beller stone, Weiberner stone and Riedener stone and was not encoded.

Parts of this language, which are taken from the dialect of the Beller, are spoken backwards , similar to the French Verlan . Individual verbs and nouns are rotated, suffixes and prefixes remain partially. This is how Beller Platt becomes the secret language Lebber Talp or Mädchen becomes Nädäm . The language has recently been investigated and it has been found that this secret knowledge is still partly present among older citizens of Bell. Since the job of the stove maker is hardly relevant for the place, knowledge of this language is also dwindling. Nevertheless, it is given a chance of survival, as a public interest in this language has developed and a functional change in the adoption of parts into everyday language is looming regionally.

Koenigswinter

The tunnel mouth hole of the underground quarry for oven stones, the oven cheek

The oven center in Königswinter in the Siebengebirge has been proven to have been in operation as early as the late Middle Ages. In the Ofenkaulen deposit there , individual hotplates with a size of up to 2 m² could be obtained underground in the tunnel. The main sales area was the Westphalian region, as baking the Westphalian Pumpernickel requires long-lasting and even heat. There is a construction plan and a sketch of the front view of the Königswinter furnace , which are exhibited in the Siebengebirgsmuseum in Königswinter. Before the First World War , there were 20-30 furnace manufacturers, which decreased to 10 after the war. In the 1920s, the company's turnover increased again, only to finally decline to insignificance due to new oven designs such as steam ovens and electric ovens. In 1960, the last stove manufacturer closed his operations there.

Gershasen

In Westerburg in Westerwald , the village Gershasen, which is a district of Westerburg today was won in the nearby tuff was. The oven manufacturers there can be traced back to the beginning of the 19th century. They initially received orders from the vicinity of the Westerwald, which expanded to Fulda, Gießen and Kassel. Around 1960 the last oven maker gave up his trade in the Westerwald. In Gershasen there is an oven-making museum, where a stone oven (called Backes there) is set up and an oven-making room is located. There is also an exhibition of tools and pictures of how oven stones were dismantled and processed.

Pelm

Between the towns of Pelm and Essingen, stone called palagonite was used for the furnace construction . It is a hydrated glass substance that was created when the glass in the basalt absorbed water. This small amount of rock was mined at the foot of the Gyppenberg by the oven maker Meyer, who was a master stonemason , and he is said to have processed up to 1,900 oven stones.

Used rocks

Exhibitions and oven museums

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Thea Merkelbach: Oven stone quarries in the Daun district. In: Heimtajahrbuch 2007. Landkreis Vulkaneifel, accessed on April 9, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c d oven construction and "Ofenkaulen" in the Siebengebirge , accessed on September 18, 2009.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Karl-Ludwig Diehl: Vaults for baking bread in the Biedermeier period: the oven makers of the Westerwald. 2007 ( Memento of March 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive ).
  4. ↑ Information ( memento of October 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) on guidohof.com.
  5. ↑ Information on meinestadt.de, accessed on September 18, 2009.
  6. ↑ a b Chronicle Unter-Widdersheim on unter-widdersheim.de
  7. ↑ Michelnau quarry on steinbruch-michelnau.de (PDF)
  8. ^ A b Secret language in Bell: Lepper Talp . On the website of the LVR Institute for Regional Studies and Regional History .
  9. ↑ Information on lbz-rlp.de (PDF; 4.4 MB), accessed on September 7, 2009.
  10. ^ Information from the Mendig Association ( Memento of March 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on September 6, 2009
  11. ^ Information from furnace builder Zepp Sen. from Bell on September 9, 2009.
  12. ↑ Peter Honnen : Secret languages ​​in the Rhineland . A documentation of the Rotwelsch dialects in Bell, Breyell, Kofferen, Neroth, Speicher and Stotzheim. In: Rhenish dialects . 2nd Edition. tape 10 . Rheinland-Verlag, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-7927-1728-X , VII. Bell, p. 175 ff . (With a CD).
  13. ↑ a b Backes, Heimat- und Ofenbauermuseum in Gershasen. City of Westerburg, accessed on April 9, 2019 .
  14. ↑ a b The volcanism of the Hessian volcanic country ( version of May 27, 2005 ( Memento of May 27, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 147 kB) via archive.org )