# DIY Pizza / Bread / Tandoori /BBQ Ovens, etc...



## jlow (Oct 6, 2009)

In 2001, I built a brick European Pizza Oven. It was sort of the prerequisite for us getting a wood burning stove. It is my avatar. Who else has built outdoor woodburning ovens or pits for cooking? I am looking to build a standing barbeque grill and other designs will give me an idea what might work. I did build a spiesbraten pit like the one in my wifes hometown in Germany.


http://picasaweb.google.com/jlowry10/PizzaOven# 

http://picasaweb.google.com/jlowry10/Speisbrauten#


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## weatherguy (Oct 6, 2009)

Why dont you build a msaonry heater? Looks like you have the skill and patience.


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## gpcollen1 (Oct 6, 2009)

I am in the planning process for my monstrosity...

I would love to do the pizza oven but don't think that it is very practical for my use.  I would like to combine an outdoor fireplace with a pizza oven and a parilla.Thought I could do the fireplace with a chamber that I could get hot enough to bake in and a side/front station that I could rake/shovel some coals to where I could have my parilla/grill located.  I think I would want to do the adjustable height parilla.

Would love to see more of what folks have at their place... 

For basic Parilla porn look here:  http://www.asadoargentina.com/overcrowded-parrilla/


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## oldmilwaukee (Oct 8, 2009)

Nice outdoor oven!

I built one in my house using the kit from superior clay, and we absolutely love it.  It's actually very practical and we fire it about twice a week.  The refractory is not as thick as firebrick, so it heats up quickly (in 1.5 hrs), and it holds decent heat (you can still cook bread in it the next morning after an evening of cooking pizza's... without another fire.)

This summer, we helped a friend build one in his backyard using firebricks - very similar to yours.  Longer to heat up, but wow it will hold a lot of heat.  That way we can use his oven for the three months of the year that it's not practical to fire our oven.  (Even though ours puts out very little heat into the house, it's still no fun to heat the house up a few more degrees in June July or August!)


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## jlow (Oct 8, 2009)

Beautiful setup!!  I wish I had the space to build something like that. My wife would actually like a large on the floor fireplace to cook in the kitchen. Something forom the early settlers. Your work is meticulous. I have a fireplace in my family room that we use to grill with in the winter. The smell of steak grilling in January is quite a pleasant experience.  Congrats on a job well done


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## oldmilwaukee (Oct 8, 2009)

Your backyard setup looks like a painting - surreal.

Is that a pork over your fire pit?  I'm getting hungry just looking at those pictures.  Yes, a fireplace is a must.  We started ours last week for the first time this season.  Nothing like grilling in the winter.  For steaks, we pull the coals near the entrance of the pizza oven, and then I have an old piece of stainless grate that we prop on firebricks over the coals.  Or sometimes, we just throw the steaks in the pizza oven and sear them right on the firebricks.  Its amazing that they don't stick.  The best part is the cleanup... a hot fire will obliterate all traces of grease, food, soot, etc. and return the oven to a bone-white state.

What is the size of your pizza oven?  About 3 feet inside side-to-side?  Ours is 36" but the height tapers to zero at the edges, so it's more like 30" effectively. I think 30 inches is about the minimum a person should go.  Unlike ours, it looks like all of your oven is usable space.  To build ours took about a 5.5 foot by 5.5 foot chunk of real estate out of our kitchen/great room.  It was hard to give up that much space to something we thought might turn out to be a novelty.  In retrospect, it was the best 30 square feet we ever allocated in the house.


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## allhandsworking (Oct 27, 2009)

Doubles as a bomb shelter


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## meathead (Oct 27, 2009)

Nothing to contribute in terms of design ideas but wanted to drop in and say these things look awesome you guys did some great work and good to hear you're getting a lot of use out of it.


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## jlow (Nov 24, 2009)

Just a short vid of pizza making yesterday!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A66cf57eLHc


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## kenny chaos (Nov 24, 2009)

jlow said:
			
		

> Just a short vid of pizza making yesterday!!
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A66cf57eLHc





 I'm curious as to the significance of your wife as German.


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## SolarAndWood (Nov 24, 2009)

Gotta love German wives, they can cook, drink and paddling with them is a pleasure.


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## jlow (Nov 24, 2009)

Can you elaborate?


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## kenny chaos (Nov 24, 2009)

jlow said:
			
		

> Can you elaborate?





Your signature shows you are proud of your German wife and that's cool.
Why not just say, "your wife?"
What is it about her being German that is important?
Just curious.
Just curious.


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## jlow (Nov 24, 2009)

Born and raised in th US, I have been greatly influenced by her heritage and work ethic. They are traits I admire and acknowledge. I have been to 16 countries and learned many different cooking techniques (wood fire related) that I would have never learned if I hadn't had the exposure to it. For that I am forever indebted to her. She also isn't yet a American citizen, so technically speaking she is my German wife!!


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## kenny chaos (Nov 24, 2009)

That's really cool.
Thanks, and tell her Kenny Chaos says, "Hi."


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## Adios Pantalones (Jan 7, 2010)

I see some cool online resources about building a woodfired pizza oven in the yard.  Has anyone here done it?

I'm thinking about making my own bricks and maybe doing a castable refractory roof.  I would also like a detached firebox that could double as a smoke generator for a smoker.  Got some ideas on design, but am looking for any major pitfalls "would have done it differently" sort of advice.


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## gpcollen1 (Jan 7, 2010)

Been throwing the same thing around for a while myself.  I still have til the landscaping is done on that side of the house to execute the plan so I have one more season.  I want the pizza oven but also want to be able to roast or smoke.

I saw this really cool outdoor fireplace at a buddies house that had essentially an alley out in front of the fire where you could rake the coals forward and roast things on a spit or grill them.  I would love to have this type of functionality as well as the pizza oven.

Very interested to see what some folks may have going on at their place.

Right now i just have a burn barrel and a charcoal grill.  I can spit roast over the barrel - which is really 1/3 of a 275 oil tank on it's side - which is oval and easy to work.  I also shovel coals from this fire into my weber for grilling when I am in the mood for REAL wood fired NY Strip....


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## Adios Pantalones (Jan 7, 2010)

Ooh- check this out:
http://www.traditionaloven.com/building/home/oliver_korber_woodoven_with_smoker_box.shtml


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## caber (Jan 7, 2010)

My wife keeps bring those up.  She really wants a wood fired pizza/bread oven.  Maybe this summer.  It is a lot of work to build one.


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## gpcollen1 (Jan 7, 2010)

That is pretty cool looking.  I guess the trick in any of that is just being able to damper down the chimney and open up a bypass into the smoker.

I suppose it would be easy enough to cast your own dome as opposed to buying a kit or trying to do it with just brick.

This is the site I was checking out back when...

https://www.fornobravo.com/index.html

There is also a pretty good pizza making site that I have to look for again...

This is a good time for this to come up as I am on day 2 of recovery from a discectomy and I will be on the couch for a few weeks...


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## 'bert (Jan 7, 2010)

There is a cool one here that was built in the guys home (if I remember right).

https://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/forums/viewthread/42766/


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## Adios Pantalones (Jan 7, 2010)

The Forno Bravo people seem to be the major supplier.

LOL- you can do all that heavy lifting in your head.  Now you need telekinesis. Get well.


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## gpcollen1 (Jan 7, 2010)

Some of the ones I have seen are so BIG.  I don't want something that huge necessarily...


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## jlow (Jan 7, 2010)

Built this back in 2001. I kind of chronicled it as it was somethin' new for me to do.


http://picasaweb.google.com/jlowry10/PizzaOven#


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## pyper (Jan 7, 2010)

I'm thinking of making an outdoor smoker/bbq pit. The smoker component would be similar to an oven, but it wouldn't be a pizza oven. I've got in mind something with an open trough at about 30" high, with an attached vertical smoker box. I'd probably make it all from cast concrete, but concrete block might come into play.

I'd like to put the whole thing under a roof and screen it too.


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## Adios Pantalones (Jan 7, 2010)

Too cool!


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## BrotherBart (Jan 8, 2010)

Adios just stick the pizza in the kiln for three seconds and it's done.  :lol:


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## fossil (Jan 8, 2010)

3 seconds in his kiln and it's gone.


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## Adios Pantalones (Jan 8, 2010)

I said that at one point during the build- if it doesn't reach temp- it's the biggest da^% woodfired pizza oven you ever saw


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## KarlK (Jan 8, 2010)

I have a pizza oven I built last year. Im a mason by trade and it took me 3 weeks to build it. I love it, makes pizza in 90 seconds and its the best pizza I ever had. On the weekends we have friends over, for pizza and beer,also been baking bread lately. The back yard smells like a bakery. I liked doing this so much I designed a DIY oven that my friends could buy and install them self in about an hour . I looked at other pre built units they were expensive and shipping made it not worth it. 
The oven Im selling is approx 34"x44" and sits on a metal stand,completely finished. Can be put together in less than 1 hr with no tools and makes great pizza!


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## wolfram (Jan 8, 2010)

A friend and I built the oven as described in The Bread Builders, a book by Alan Scott and Daniel Wing.  Instructions were perfect, materials easy to get, and required skill level matched our extreme inexperience.  Not cheap, but the oven will outlast several generations in the family.  I highly recommend it.

The book is available at Amazon and everywhere else.

IIRC, the hearth measured something like 36" x 32".  It takes several hours to get heated up for baking bread.  For pizza, it takes an hour to put the heat into the bricks.

For spur of the moment pizza parties, I have a portable wood-fired pizza oven that goes anywhere with us.  From idea to first pizza is one hour, including time it takes to prepare sauce and dough.

There is no good reason to eat Dominos anymore!

EDIT:  jlow might have built the same one!  Nice work!


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## gpcollen1 (Jan 8, 2010)

How about some pics of that one from 'The Bread builders'?


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## gpcollen1 (Jan 8, 2010)

Some interesting info here for the firepit/smoker model.  

http://www.ibiblio.org/lineback/bbq/wdh.htm


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## wolfram (Jan 9, 2010)

CTWood, here is a link to some good pics of representative ovens.  There is a lot of good info there and they are a good group.

Brick Bake Oven Page Including Photos


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## abd1 (Jan 9, 2010)

I'm extremely envious. My dream is to have a brick oven in my yard someday, but we don't have a lot of space. I told my wife the other day that if she wants us to stay in this house forever (she hates moving) she just needs to let me put a brick oven in, then I'm never leaving.


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## DavidV (Jan 9, 2010)

I have been planning one for a number of years.  Started getting building materials together a couple years ago then had to put it on hold.  I have a stack of about 1000 bricks sitting out back that desperately needs some company.

So why did you place the chimney toward the front instead of toward the rear?  I was planning my chimney toward the rear.  Also, did you use special fire brick and mortor for the inside of the oven?


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## jlow (Jan 10, 2010)

The fire is in back and the heat is to roll over the pizza, hence the chimney in front. I did some research on design of a pizza oven and this was the verdict. It also heats all the firebricks front to back.


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## Gooserider (Jan 10, 2010)

Seeing as how we had two threads going on essentially the same subject, at the same time, I decided to merge them together so as to get all the discussion under the same thread...

Definitely a cool idea, I'm sorely tempted myself, although low-carb and pizza don't exactly go together...

Gooserider


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## DavidV (Jan 11, 2010)

Ok, so I officially throw down the gauntlet now.  I will build my Forno This spring. Wife will love it because that means I will expand the pool area and build the roofed area out there. I plan to have the MegaMother of BBQ areas.  Forno, outdoor fireplace, Smoker, gasgrill area and of course, covered seating near the pool. What the hell. Why not do it this year?


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## DavidV (Jan 11, 2010)

So what about the brick and mortar? Anything special?


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## Gooserider (Jan 11, 2010)

There were a bunch of websites on building them, with widely different opinions on the topic, however I did see several that advised against using traditional red bricks and mortar - claim was that they would "spall" or spit out little chips of brick into whatever you were cooking - might be good for mineral content, but didn't sound very appetizing...

Seemed to me like the general recommendation for at least the interior was either fireclay or refractory firebricks and mortar - or other equivalently heat resistant materials...  The insulation layer should be vermiculite or other fireproof material, and the outside can be pretty much anything you like...

There was a LOT of material about the thickness of the shell and related topics - essentially what I got from it was that the thicker the shell the longer it would take to get up to temperature, and the more wood it would take, but the longer it would stay hot - like almost everything we encounter dealing with this fire stuff, there are a bunch of compromises and trade-offs to consider...  You need to do a lot of research and consideration of what your cooking needs are in order to make a wise choice about what to build...

Gooserider


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## wolfram (Jan 11, 2010)

Regarding the history, design, materials and operation of a brick bake oven, The Bread Builders book is complete and cheap compared to the cost of the oven.  I am sure I spent over $1,000 on materials for the oven we built.

If it's about great pizza and not bread or the thrill of building a brick oven, the portable "oven" we have here is the winner.  It consists of about 30 full size firebrick ($1.50 each) and a lid from a Weber-type grill set up on a stand of some sort (I made a wooden stand).  On the stand, we create a hearth from the firebrick, preferably laying on end to give a 4.5" deep hearth.  We use some firebrick on the 9" tall end to create a three-sided ledge from which to lay the Weber grill lid.  Oven opening is to the front.  We build and maintain a fire on the hearth and grab a beer and go inside to make the dough or better yet, outsource the dough making and keep tending to the fire.

After a time, the coals are moved away from the center of the hearth.  Most of the ash is brushed aside too.  We throw some corn meal on the hearth and it will tell you if the hearth is ready for pizza.  Too hot and it will burn immediately.  If hot enough, throw a pizza directly on the hearth.  We turn it when it needs turning.  It will be done in a few minutes.

Most all of the cost of the portable oven is in the firebrick if you can scrounge a lid.  For $50 total, pizza is as good as the $1,000 oven, no doubt.

Some people think they can tell the difference between apple-fired pizza and oak-fired pizza.  I have my doubts.

For an even cheaper solution, we have added a small firebrick hearth made from firebrick splits (half thickness firebrick) to a propane-fired grill.  Heat brick, cook pizza.  It works great, but not the same aesthetics as cooking on a wood-fired hearth.


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## jlow (Jan 11, 2010)

This is the book I used as a reference to build the oven. One tip is that I built mine on a 6" slab so if I need to move it, it can be lifted by a Hi-Lo.


http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Builders-Hearth-Loaves-Masonry/dp/1890132055/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b


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## DavidV (Mar 29, 2010)

I broke ground today on my outdoor kitchen which will include pizza oven and outdoor fireplace.    I have researched pizza overns over and over and over and noticed that you use half cylinder shape VS the circle dome design that many people use.  What do you see as the advantage/disadvantage to your design?  have you had any cracks?

Thanks.

David


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## DavidV (Oct 26, 2010)

The oven is nearly complete.  I have been cooking in it since July.  I am putting the roof on this week.


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## Shari (Oct 26, 2010)

davidv said:
			
		

> The oven is nearly complete.  I have been cooking in it since July.  I am putting the roof on this week.



Pictures????

Shari


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## Badfish740 (Oct 26, 2010)

Great idea for a thread-I've pondered this one from time to time for our next home.  I thought about maybe building something jutting off of the kitchen so that you could use it without cooking the whole house-I think they called that a summer kitchen at one time?  My wife makes a pretty good pizza with our crappy Maytag electric oven so I can't imagine how good it would taste in a brick oven fired with wood


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## DavidV (Nov 9, 2010)

I still havn't put the roof on.....Hunting season has it's teeth into me.


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