The summer of the pizza oven

A few posts ago I asked if you'd be happy to take a short detour from sewing so that I could share some photos of the pizza oven that my husband has been working on this summer. I had so many positive comments and emails on the subject that I think it merits a few posts as many of you asked for a technical breakdown as to how you (or actually your husband) could build a pizza oven from scratch, so that's what will follow this post - hopefully in the next day or so, whenever my husband gets a moment to write it all down. In the meantime, here's my own non-technical thoughts on matters. 

I was initially sceptical about the whole idea of building a pizza oven in our back garden - when my husband enthused over how much better stone-baked pizzas would taste I thought he was romanticising it and I questioned what was wrong with the double-width oven we'd had installed in our kitchen especially for large-scale pizza creation.  But the stack of books on the subject by his bedside grew taller, our conversations were more frequently interrupted by his pondering some aspect of construction, and his one-sided discussions over where in our garden would be the best site became more insistent in the need for a decision to be reached so that building could commence. I rejected his plan to monopolise the patio with it and eventually grudgingly agreed that an area alongside our incredibly ugly garage where it would be shrouded by a boisterous buddleia was a permissible site.  I am now eating humble pie alongside my stone-baked pizzas for his pizza oven is a triumph in every way and I wish that I had been more receptive to his initial enthusiasm.

Most of the materials were bought at reclamation yards - we visited many times to pick out just the right sort of bricks. We chose pavers for the oven floor because they're smooth and flat. Elsewhere we used bricks salvaged from a local water company - they bear the name of our town on them, a small detail which we both love. Ideally we would have used old sleepers for the base, but I worried over the creosote that might have been used to treat them in the past and so eventually we decided that it was better to buy these new - the wood at the moment rather ugly, but by the end of the winter it will have dulled to a lovely driftwood grey. Longtime readers might notice from the photos above that, really, my husband has already had a test run at building a pizza oven in ice.

The igloo that he built a few years ago was basically just a giant frozen pizza oven waiting to happen.

It took weeks to build up the layers needed to create a dome so well insulated that it would foster a furnace capable of reaching temperatures of 600 degrees. First there were bricks and cement, then a mixture of clay and wood shavings. Later, came a mix of lime and cement. At each stage a fire had to be lit to dry out the building materials and allow any heat cracks to be filled. We were lucky that my husband had friends who shared his enthusiasm and who were even prepared to take days off work to help him build it. On the day that they finished the clay layer, he and his friend Ben realised that the extra layer had already increased the fire's temperature to the extent that they thought they might be able to cook pizza in it. I quickly made up a batch of dough and that night, without the necessary pizza paddles, they manhandled the floppy uncooked pizzas onto the scorching oven floor using spatulas attached to sticks and a large helping of determination. The cooked pizzas were utterly delicious and it felt like magic. I realised that my husband's extravagant claims that he would be able to cook pizzas in under two minutes weren't so far-fetched after all. The first one was ready to eat in just 90 seconds and tasted better than any pizza I'd ever eaten before.

Just days after it was finished a truck load of wood arrived at our house - a fragrant mixture of applewood and ash, that took an hour for my husband and daughter to carry from the drive to the log store beneath the oven. On the same day a set of pizza peels and brushes arrived - a gift from his lovely mother who was almost as excited by the project as my husband was.

It feels like every weekend for months has revolved around the pizza oven and when it wasn't at the stage of being ready to cook pizzas in we lit fires in it and ate take-away pizzas around it and the children got into the habit of playing black-out football, laughing with delight as they crashed into unseen obstacles. One evening at dusk a flock of geese flew overhead in a perfect 'V' formation, honking joyfully...we stood in the garden stunned and it's been placed in my memory pot as one of the moments from this summer where everything, for a moment, felt quite perfect.

A few weeks before the oven was finished my husband began investigating sourdough recipes. Subsequently, his sourdough starter, which has been named Cecil, has sat on the kitchen work surface fermenting and doing strange things as he's tended to it each day. Yesterday he made bread from it.

And I used the residual heat from the oven to bake root vegetables with rosemary and feta.



Today, he made pizzas again, his first attempt at using a sourdough base for them.

After some of the fire has been removed from the oven and the burning embers pushed to the sides, the pizza is ready to be baked. 

It is flipped from the metal peel onto the oven floor.

And brought out again shortly afterwards, crispy, golden and piping hot.



Favourite flavours are red onion and goats cheese....blue cheese and goats cheese...or just goat's cheese and goat's cheese.



And when the table is full of pizzas....we are ready to eat.

This post is written by a pizza oven convert. A post discussing the laying of hardcore, clay ratios and other vital information is to follow...should you feel the wish to nudge your husband in the direction of brick oven building.

Florence x