Wood Fired Pizza Oven [stage 4]

So it's finally time to fire up the oven and see if it works! That is to see if it will hold it's heat, cook pizza and some bread in the stored heat afterwards.

Mmmmmm! Pizzas cooking away nicely... The recipe for the base came from a great bread book called 'The Bread Baker's Apprentice' which has some fantastic incites in to bread and it's making plus some of the best recipes I have tried (not that I have tried a lot before the oven was made!)

Charles is certainly happy at the helm of the oven... handles a peel like a pro! and just like Charles... they're big and they're cheesy!!!

So the final conclusion... a great success! There will be many pizzas cooked in this little beauty and a few parties too I would say! interestingly the oven is still toasty warm 48 hours later!

There are a couple of things we would do differently next time. it was a learning curve and we did make mistakes, but hey! it works and that's all that really matters when you have a mouthful of good pizza!!!

Wood Fired Pizza Oven [stage 3]

More hard work, a weekend with a bricksaw (luckily it was sunny so the solar panels helped reduce the energy use. The saw was required to cut the angles on the bricks so that the dome took shape without too much refractory mortar required.

Then layer by layer, brick by brick, the dome takes shape!

With the brickwork finished and the chimney in place... Hmmm! can almost smell those pizzas already!

Charles made a fairly solid door for the front out of some of the hard wood we had left over from the Guest room build. lined inside with a sheet of thin steel to keep the heat in and to protect the door.

The insulation layer of vermiculite is then spread over the brickwork, this in retrospect, should have been replaced by a fibreglass insulation blanket which would have allowed for the expansion of the chamber more than the vermiculite does.

Then a render coat over the top and the oven is ready for a small fire to test the brickwork and then a raging fire to get some food cooked!!! looking forward to it!