Tweet
Hi ya'll, I'm Craig and i've been lurking on the forum the past month or so. Wish I had read a few of the posts months ago before i commited a few things to concrete.
My oven complex is about three weeks out from completion...of course its been three weeks out for the past four, so something ain't right with the calender. Actually its just the little nagging details that take all the time.
I'm sort off the books here in my constuction. The oven complex is a monster retaining wall cut into the side of my pond's dam...risky, but I needed the space. there are actually 3 cooking ovens/ surfaces. On the left side is basically my oyster cooking oven... a fire box holding up a metal plate that will be covered with half cut 55 gallon drums. Still have to attach the hinges and now I'm thinking about coating the drums with a vermiculite concrete...more about that later. Base of the oyster pit is brickwork, but I have to admit that I'm no mason. "Function over form" best describes my methods.
Smoke from the oyster pit normally will be routed up a chminey made of 14 inch flue tiles covered with steel and concrete backer board. The flue tiles are oversized but were free for the hauling from a former coworker's husbands junkpile. Also, all the metal in this project (a lot!) came from another former co-worker in trade for a pickup load of turkey litter. All the concrete backer will be covered with fiberglass reinforced concrete (bonsal surwal)... looks enough like stucco plus adds strength.
I've also constucted a damper arangement that will allow the smoke to shunt into oven #2, the pig smoker oven. Pig oven is all brick with a couple of metal removable shelves. I figure it'll hold 200 pounds of porker. There is a firebox opening at the bottom of the pig oven that I can transfer hot coals from firebox 1 if I want to do hot smoking, otherwise, just shunting smoke will be for cold smoking. Also made some provisions to hang fish or jerky in the top of the pig oven when its in the cold smoking mode.
The pig smoker oven supports my pizza / bread oven. This is made from ferro cement, which is simply concrete mortar mix packed into an armature frame made of hogwire and chickenwire. Ferro cement is cheap but does take a lot of handwork. I know from reading this forum now that I didn't make the pizza oven the optimum shape and its probably too small.... consider it a cross between a dome and a barrel. Inside width is about 24 inches, depth is 28 and max height is 18 inches. It'll work, but one pizza at a time and the fire will have to stay at the back.
I ended up lining the inside of the dome with cone 6 earthware pottery clay because I didn't like the roughness of the ferrocement...(figuring the heat would fire it in place)...Big cracks developed in the clay as it air-dried becasue of how it adhered unevenly to the ferrocement. After a couple of sessions re-claying the cracks, I gave and coat the inside with the bonsal. Then, because I didn't want fiberglass particles flaking off into the food, I messed around and came up with a formulation of portland cement, fireclay and powdered kaolin clay (Just happened to have 1/2 bag of kaolin laying around from use with shrimp bait...it has ~35% alumina content so very heat resistive and retentive). Floor of the oven was made of a 2.25 inch thick smooth pour of the portland/fireclay/kaolin mix with a little bit of sand mixed in. The Floor is supported by a ferrocement slab (1/2 inch thick) resting on a couple inches of 5:1 vermiculite/portland mix.
Fired the pizza oven up two weeks ago for first time. Worry was that the mulitple layers would delaminate. Progressively hot fires in suceeding days. My infared thermeter maxes out at 968 degrees. Sunday I maxed it out in about two hours of fire. No delamination and just one minor crack. Temps were ~600 two hours after the fire died. 30 hours later, inside temp was still 95 degrees... thats without a door and with night temperateure dipping down to 36, so it seems like there is decent mass.
Building the outside enclosure now... more concrete board and lots of vemiculite. (Forgot to mention that I found a vermiculite mine about 90 minutes away that sold me 42 4-cubic foot bags at $5.60 each... more than the oven needs, but I got other uses for the rest when I put a new liner in the pool)....
Figure my cost for the pizza oven part of the project is less than $95. Haven't advanced to cooking yet as its a major construction zone out there, but I'll send some pictures when I get it cleaned up.
My oven complex is about three weeks out from completion...of course its been three weeks out for the past four, so something ain't right with the calender. Actually its just the little nagging details that take all the time.
I'm sort off the books here in my constuction. The oven complex is a monster retaining wall cut into the side of my pond's dam...risky, but I needed the space. there are actually 3 cooking ovens/ surfaces. On the left side is basically my oyster cooking oven... a fire box holding up a metal plate that will be covered with half cut 55 gallon drums. Still have to attach the hinges and now I'm thinking about coating the drums with a vermiculite concrete...more about that later. Base of the oyster pit is brickwork, but I have to admit that I'm no mason. "Function over form" best describes my methods.
Smoke from the oyster pit normally will be routed up a chminey made of 14 inch flue tiles covered with steel and concrete backer board. The flue tiles are oversized but were free for the hauling from a former coworker's husbands junkpile. Also, all the metal in this project (a lot!) came from another former co-worker in trade for a pickup load of turkey litter. All the concrete backer will be covered with fiberglass reinforced concrete (bonsal surwal)... looks enough like stucco plus adds strength.
I've also constucted a damper arangement that will allow the smoke to shunt into oven #2, the pig smoker oven. Pig oven is all brick with a couple of metal removable shelves. I figure it'll hold 200 pounds of porker. There is a firebox opening at the bottom of the pig oven that I can transfer hot coals from firebox 1 if I want to do hot smoking, otherwise, just shunting smoke will be for cold smoking. Also made some provisions to hang fish or jerky in the top of the pig oven when its in the cold smoking mode.
The pig smoker oven supports my pizza / bread oven. This is made from ferro cement, which is simply concrete mortar mix packed into an armature frame made of hogwire and chickenwire. Ferro cement is cheap but does take a lot of handwork. I know from reading this forum now that I didn't make the pizza oven the optimum shape and its probably too small.... consider it a cross between a dome and a barrel. Inside width is about 24 inches, depth is 28 and max height is 18 inches. It'll work, but one pizza at a time and the fire will have to stay at the back.
I ended up lining the inside of the dome with cone 6 earthware pottery clay because I didn't like the roughness of the ferrocement...(figuring the heat would fire it in place)...Big cracks developed in the clay as it air-dried becasue of how it adhered unevenly to the ferrocement. After a couple of sessions re-claying the cracks, I gave and coat the inside with the bonsal. Then, because I didn't want fiberglass particles flaking off into the food, I messed around and came up with a formulation of portland cement, fireclay and powdered kaolin clay (Just happened to have 1/2 bag of kaolin laying around from use with shrimp bait...it has ~35% alumina content so very heat resistive and retentive). Floor of the oven was made of a 2.25 inch thick smooth pour of the portland/fireclay/kaolin mix with a little bit of sand mixed in. The Floor is supported by a ferrocement slab (1/2 inch thick) resting on a couple inches of 5:1 vermiculite/portland mix.
Fired the pizza oven up two weeks ago for first time. Worry was that the mulitple layers would delaminate. Progressively hot fires in suceeding days. My infared thermeter maxes out at 968 degrees. Sunday I maxed it out in about two hours of fire. No delamination and just one minor crack. Temps were ~600 two hours after the fire died. 30 hours later, inside temp was still 95 degrees... thats without a door and with night temperateure dipping down to 36, so it seems like there is decent mass.
Building the outside enclosure now... more concrete board and lots of vemiculite. (Forgot to mention that I found a vermiculite mine about 90 minutes away that sold me 42 4-cubic foot bags at $5.60 each... more than the oven needs, but I got other uses for the rest when I put a new liner in the pool)....
Figure my cost for the pizza oven part of the project is less than $95. Haven't advanced to cooking yet as its a major construction zone out there, but I'll send some pictures when I get it cleaned up.
...enjoy every sandwich!
Comment