First Pizza Oven help

[Tiffer]

Hiya all,

Im just about to build my first pizza oven and just looking for some advice. I’m basing the design on the guide here:

http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/stories/how-to-build-a-wood-fired-pizza-oven/

I had a raised garden and have dug out a patio and dug out a square for the oven at the back and so the lower walls of the oven(roughly 60cm) will be surrounded by the soil/garden and only the front will be open to the patio - I assume this won’t have any negative effects on the oven? My main thought is for the dome - Is the dome better built with bricks as I see in some designs? Are the ones with dome made with just clay(like the one I’m basing my oven from) ok for its purpose (just 2-3 pizza's, couple of times a week and poss bread or other little bits)? For this oven - I have read the author has advised around 1 hour to heat up but on another page around 2 hours, how long do you think would take to heat up on this type of oven.

Also is this design the best if I just wanted to cook pizza and nothing else? Is the lower part of the base (Glass bottles etc…) more for the bread and keeping heat when the fire is out?

Many thanks for any help - will be appreciated J

[Silken]

Hi Tiffer,

I was at the dentist when I saw the same article, which persuaded me to build a pizza oven. We ended up building one with vermiculite, clay, sand & cement mix using a 75cm exercise ball....I had some straw left over from a hamper so I chopped that up and it went into the mix... We also inserted some chicken wire on the top part of the dome for added strength. We built it on top of a contraption with strong castors so that once it was set, we could wheel it around to the plinth that we had built. It took 3 men (husband & 2 neighbours to lift it up onto the plinth... we also used a trolley jack at one point so that we could site it more accurately.. On hindsight, it might have been better to mold it over the sand and then it could have been built in situ... Since it has been built and fired up to the max... It reaches temperatures off the scale.. It cooks a pizza in a minute and then I cook chicken pieces, steaks etc and last of all, I pop a joint of meat in a casserole dish and it cooks overnight and is absolutely perfect the next day... It takes approx 1 hour to heat up... and we buy the logs from Home Bargains..

I hope this helps... We have just added another 2 layers onto the pizza oven so I am hoping that it doesn't crack when we fire it up again...

Re the plinth... We filled ours up with old council slabs and then did a 4" slab of the vermiculite mix and once that had dried, we added a good layer of broken clay pots (I am a keen gardener so I had a lot of cracked ones under the hedge so hubby smashed them up with a mallet) and then a layer of sand and then the fire bricks.. I believe the point of the clay and the vermiculite is to stop the heat being dragged down.... if that makes sense. I didn't want to turn into an alcoholic drinking loads of wine just for the empty bottles !!!

[Fizz]

I think the glass bottle way of insulating the floor is outdated, unless you are going down the really, really, really cheap road when building. Modern insulation materials are somewhat expensive, but offer better insulating properties in less height.

[Tiffer]

Thank you both very much for your responses... Think I will do something similar to you Silken and will use something better than the glass bottles for insulating floor... The article doesn't advise the type of brick for the actual floor to cook on and think in one of the authors blogs he said just use regular bricks... would fire brick be better to use for it then? Thanks again

[Silken]

Sorry to be so long in replying but we used proper fire bricks... I know they are expensive but we have no problem with them... I read in some articles that you can use ordinary bricks that don't have the holes in them (I had loads of monoblock left) but I chose to use proper fire bricks... I haven't regretted the decision as our oven reaches 800 degrees plus in an hour and we know that the firebricks can take that temperature and more...

Hope this helps