Building your own pizza oven is a great DIY project

There are three main ways of building your own wood-fired pizza oven

1) Traditional Clay oven

Finishing the chimneyThis is the cheapest and simplest to build, using rubble and railway sleepers for a base, some bricks for the firing base and clay and sand for the oven itself. If you can build a sandcastle at the beach, then you can build one of these. The disadvantage is that it takes a long time to heat up and is not big enough to keep a fire going, once you start cooking.
Check out my clay oven build

2) Brick Oven

Brick OvenThis type of oven takes some bricklaying skill and is the second cheapest option. Three of us took two days of hard work to build ours. It heats up in 4 hours and is big enough to keep a fire going to cook pizza all night – a few weeks ago we cooked 42 pizzas in an hour.
Check out the Mk2 pizza oven build made out of bricks!



3) Ooni pizza oven

One of my friends has bought an Ooni pizza oven and loves it. They look great, cook well and are aimed at making pizza for your family. Our big wood fired oven takes 5hrs to get to temperature, but then we will cook 90 pizzas at a party! The Ooni oven gets to 500oC in less than half an hour. BUT it will only do one pizza at a time!
It retails in the UK at £299 and in the US at $350.

Amazon UK*
Amazon US*
They also do a gas fired version which sounds wrong!

4)Ready made full size oven

Vitcas Casa OvenYou can buy cast ovens ready to mount on a base – prices start at £500 and go into the thousands! The one pictured is made by Vitcas and retails on Amazon* at £749 including delivery – it’s simple to assemble and suitable for a smaller graden.


I’m not going to mention the £100 metal monstrosities from discount supermarkets and garden centres – a friend bought one. A total waste of money!

Bread: River Cottage Handbook No. 3
Bread: River Cottage Handbook Before you get going, I cannot recommend highly enough the River Cottage Bread Book , which has not only sorted out my bread making skills, but contains great instructions on pizza oven building.
Why not buy it from Amazon.co.uk now?*

 

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