Golden Hoof Farm

Karel and Alice Starek have been friends and clients for 18 years now and recently established the Golden Hoof Farm in Boulder. We collaborated on this smokehouse, outdoor kitchen, and pizza oven project starting in Spring 2016. The stone building behind the oven and firebox/cooktop is one of the original structures on the farm, likely dating back to the 1850’s. We designed the firebox for smoke to travel over and through a vertical stone chamber behind the firebox and enter the building near to the ground inside the old stone building, making it a smokehouse for large cuts of meat and hides. We also fabricated a funky steel slide gate that will allow smoke to be diverted through the pizza oven to smoke smaller cuts of meat.

Most of the stone and metal on this project came from previous projects we built together. The granite cobbles, simmer burner left of the cooktop, the door to the fireplace, and the handle to the pizza oven door were recovered from debris after the Stareks lost their home in the Four Mile Fire in 2010. The glaze on the bricks was leftover from a downtown Denver loft renovation we did together in 2006. Alice salvaged the cooktop from a 1930’s Banquet wood cookstove, and everything else we used came from scrap at the farm.