Last weekend, students in Forest Hall got the first taste of Middlebury’s newest alternative dining option: pizza from the recently installed cob oven in the Organic Garden. The idea for the sustainable wood-fired oven came from students Caitlin Haedrich ’16.5 and Larson Lovdal ’16.5 last fall, following a visit to Haedrich’s hometown, which has a large public oven.
“We used the oven there and decided it seemed like something the Middlebury community really needed,” Haedrich said.
Plans for the project began after fall break, and the two submitted a proposal to the Space Committee in the spring. However, the process of getting approval from the College was far more difficult than they had imagined. Haedrich talked about several of the safety hoops they had to jump through in the planning process.
“It seemed like a weekend project, but as we started to get into it, it ended up being a really big deal,” she said. “This is a really innocent project but the amount of concern the college has about liability and health and safety is huge, which makes sense.”
The two worked alongside Jen Kazmierczak, the Environmental Health and Safety Coordinator, to flesh out all of the details.
The project was funded in part by Ross and Cook commons in an effort to promote cross-commons unity by bringing people together over good local foods. Money from the commons was used to build the oven itself, which is made primarily out of materials the students found on campus.
“My favorite part of the oven is that everything in it comes from within a very small radius,” Haedrich said. Unusable stone from the construction of several buildings were used for different parts of the oven.
“We have [stone from] Bicentennial Hall as the hearth, the library is the cornerstone, construction at Nelson is the base, and the cobble on the side is old rock from the Geology department,” Haedrich explained. The clay used for the dome is recycled from unusable leftovers found in the sinks of the ceramics club’s studio. The hay used came directly from the Organic Garden.
The Organic Garden’s involvement with the project began when Haedrich and Lovdal contacted Organic Garden Consultant Jay Leshinsky last winter when trying to figure out where to place the oven on campus.
“We agreed that it would be a good site and we would be able to provide vegetables for cooking at the oven”, Leshinsky said.
As it turned out, contacting Leshinsky helped the project out financially as well.
“At the same time a friend of mine approached me to provide a gift that would fund the majority of the project. She thought that a pizza oven at the Organic Farm would provide an excellent environment for discussions about food and farming in a setting where the food was being grown,” Leshinsky explained. This anonymous donation was used to build the structure that protects the oven and its users from wind and rain.
Construction took place in just two weeks over the summer. “They were really long days,” Haedrich said. “We had help from a couple of students, but for the most part it was Larson and I on the job site from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.”
While the oven is now up and running, there are still a few boxes that need to be checked before it is available for student use. Haedrich and Lovdal hope that, by the spring semester, any student who completes the safety steps — which include watching a brief instructional video on how to operate the oven — will be allowed access to the oven. Individuals who wish to use the oven will bring their own ingredients, but the two hope that it will be used for larger school functions as well.
“It’s a site where they can have alumni functions or sports team events,” Haedrich said. “It’s a long-term contribution to the college and I hope that it gets well used and loved.”
