Greetings!

[nissanneill]

Re: Greetings!

Welcome Brian,
I was in your situation a few months ago and have just cleaned up after anotheer big family cook-up for 16 people and 24 pizzas and numerous other pita bread concoctions, the pompeii is still hot enough to continue cooking even 7 hours after lighting it.
You can cook mant loaves per batch and numerous batches with each good firing.
The only problem is to arrange the sequencing of the batches, ie. once you get the oven up to pizza temps (in excess of 500?C) cook pizzas for a couple of hours, remove the fire and coals and cool for several batches of bread, then as the oven cools, do the lamb or beef roast then topped off with deserts etc.
We really need to fire it up for pizza lunches, fresh baked bread for afternoon tea, roast with trimmings for dinner topped off with your favourite sweets dish(es). I tend to cook extra pizzas for taking to work for lunches and evening meals but currently are on holidays.
Get going with your plans and building and then enjoy.
You can follow my build through the forum.
All the very best.
Neill

[Dutchoven]

Re: Greetings!

Good luck to you! I think you will find great help and advice from all members of the forum!
Best
Dutch

[BrianShaw]

Hello,

I just joined the forum after quite a bit of research in the books and other online forums.

I am a decent amateur cook in several genres but especially like baking. My baking preference tends toward wild yeast cultures and rustic breads of many kinds. Right now I am using a residential oven with a baking stone. I think I am starting to outgrow it - not in terms of size or volume but in lack of temperature. My breads are okay, but pizza (my passion) is good but less than perfect.

Sometime in the future I would like to build a brick oven. After looking at the Alan Scott and Russell Jervon designs, I found the Pompeii. The Pompeii looks like the oven for me! The thoughts of having a brick oven that can be brought to temp in a relatively short time and will support the needs of my family - three or four pizzas and a couple of loaves of bread once or twice a week - consume most of my spare thinking time. At the present I'm "negotiating" the idea with my spouse and thinking through one challenge associated with the proposed site.

Brian