bread loaf

Saint Paul Bread Club

We knead to bake!

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Location: Quest for Ovens / Business Ovens
 

Business Ovens in Minnesota and Nearby

A-to-Z Produce

Stockholm, Wisconsin

Original A-to-Z Produce Brick Oven

The original oven in 2004.

Both A-to-Z Produce Brick Ovens

The pair of ovens in 2010.

A-to-Z now has a pair of ovens based on Alan Scott’s design. (The new oven is on the right in this picture.)

According to one Stockholm resident, on a busy summer night, they turn out 300 pizzas.

They only make pizzas on Tuesday nights. When it gets cold, they will stop making pizza and resume making pizza “sometime in the spring.”

The Bread Club went there on a field trip in 2004. At Wednesday noon the oven has cooled enough so that it can be used to bake bread.

Sometime recently they created their own web site.

Quest for Ovens Blog Post

Brick Oven Bakery

630 Professional Drive, Northfield, Minnesota 55057, 507-645-9517

Brick Oven Bakery's Oven

The Brick Oven Bakery was the destination for an SPBC field trip. People along for the trip heard how the oven was originally fired with wood, but because of the lack of convenience it was converted to electric heat. It is still a retained heat oven, but the heat comes from electricity instead of burning wood.

Subsequent communications revealed that it is an Alan Scott design with a hearth size of 56 inches by 72 inches (almost 5 feet by 6 feet) built in 1996.

Bricks Neapolitan Pizza

Hudson, Wisconsin

Bricks oven

Bricks oven

My wife and I took a day trip that included a visit to Bricks Neapolitan Pizza in Hudson, Wisconsin. It was relatively easy to find (on the main drag through town).

We both liked the pizzas we individually ordered.

Nelson Stone Barn

Nelson, Wisconsin

The Nelson Stone Barn is open seasonally (early April to early October).

According to the man behind the bar that I talked to, they make between 40 and 100 pizzas a night.

According to their web site: “Hours to the general public: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 5pm – 9pm.” So, they are open more days, but fewer months, than A-to-Z Produce.

QfO Blog Post

Pizza Festa di Viaggio

Minneapolis, Minnesota

This is one of the mobile oven businesses based in the Twin Cities. Terry Griffin was kind enough to send me a picture of their oven.

Pizza Festa mobile oven

I haven’t been to any Pizza Festa di Viaggio events yet, but I look forward to one.

Round Barn Farm Bed and Breakfast

Red Wing, Minnesota

Round Barn Farm Brick Oven

The Round Barn Farm Bed & Breakfast & Bread in Red Wing, Minnesota has a brick oven.

The oven is built into the oldest structure on the farm, a smoke house. It is easily big enough to hold a half-dozen artisan loaves of bread.

According to what I was told when my wife and I stayed there, their health department inspector requires that only guests in the B&B&B bake in the oven.

Urban Garden Pizza Experience

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Urban Garden Pizza Experience Sign Urban Garden Pizza Experience Wood-Fired Oven Urban Garden Pizza Experience Wood-Fired Oven closeup

I got a “field report” from Terry Savoie about an oven near the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market. I went to check it out. I found a built-up patio area near the southeast corner of the market.

There does appear to be a wood-burning oven used to make pizza. It seems to be a concrete barrel vault (approximately a half-cylinder), with a flue near the front just at the top of the curve. It’s not what I would consider to be a good oven design, but apparently it works. It does not appear to be efficient.

The fact that the front of the oven is so black tells me that the flue is too small, so lots of combustion gases go out the front instead. Maybe I’m wrong.

There were ashes in the oven, so it must have been used. There was no indication of hours of operation or how it was all supposed to work. A Google search for “Urban Garden Pizza Experience” didn’t show any relevant information.

Vineyard Bistro

Red Wing, Minnesota

Vineyard Bistro oven 1 Vineyard Bistro oven 2

My wife and I visited the Vineyard Bistro (on July 1, 2011) and had a nice chat with Potter John and his wife Ann, owners of Falconer Vineyards.

John told me how he had worked at a pizza place much earlier in his life and then later in life was a potter and kiln builder.

If I remember the dates correctly, he started the vineyard in about 2003.

In 2010 John built an oven for pizza and started the Vineyard Bistro.

The bistro is a covered terrace overlooking the bowl of the valley with growing grape vines and wildlife.

The pizzas we had seemed well executed. They have a gluten-free pizza crust available as well as their standard pizza crust, which has some whole wheat flour in it.

(Original Quest for Ovens blog post)

Other Businesses Nearby

There are other businesses that we believe have brick ovens, but we don’t have pictures of their ovens.

Minnesota

Wisconsin

Wisconsin Wood-Fired Oven Businesses on a Map

Other Businesses of Interest

Eve MacLeish’s Brick Oven

Merida, Venezuela

Eve MacLeish's Brick Oven

Eve has an oven, but not in this country. She uses it as part of a commercial bakery.

Round Hill House and Bowe Cabin

Durand, Wisconsin

Round Hill House and Bowe Cabin on the Chippewa River, near Durand, Wisconsin is unusual in that it has a wood-fired oven that can be used by people who rent the property.

The oven appears to be an Alan Scott barrel-vault oven. (It seems to be near the Bowe Cabin.)

The information on the web page does not mention the oven, but a Google search for “Round Hill brick oven Durand” will return several mentions of it. It seems to date from 2008 or earlier.

Wisconsin Pizza Farms

Some of the popular internet searches that find some of my pages are

  • brick oven pizza farm wisconsin
  • western wi pizza
  • western wisconsin pizza farms
  • wisconsin pizza farms

Partly this was driven by the cover story in the June, 2011 issue of Midwest Living magazine, the first part of which can be found here

Just to focus on “pizza farms”, here again are the appropriate links.

These and some other “pizza farms” can be found on my Quest for Ovens blog under the label farm.