how to light a pizza oven

hi, here's my new toy, dig what it does

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G4uHIwMN00&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjfksM_xfBQ&feature=channel&list=UL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl0JxvhErFI&authuser=0

tim

The Oven

Its still a bit of a mess but we have had 3 pizza events so far all succesful, this is easter this year and we are getting @ 20-25 pizzas an hour out of it. I this picture you can see the top of the oven has now been rendered, th ebrick at the right side are for the next project - the smoker oven. you can also see how the little buffetbar/herb garden is situated, the render you see on th ebottom of the herb garden is the render i will be using to finish off the pizza oven bottom.

This is me and Aunty TD, hav'n a bit of a laugh before we get started.

the bricks at the back are also for the smoker, keep a track of that blog as its going to be an interesting one as well. http://smokeroven.blogspot.com/ as its a tandoor oven as well !

I'll be creating a better structure for weather-proofing the cook of the pizza oven asap, that white frames gotta GO.

heaps of pizzas

We hd the official opening on sunday of the oven, 15 people came and we did around 25+ pizzas in 1.5 hours, it all went to plan and they were fantastic.

We made the dough and had a mix of toppings, people just chose what they wanted and we made the pizzas just for them, and to share of course.

The plan is to have a special menu board with all the families favourites and name them "the tim" , "the ruby" etc etc for we we have parties

I did a COMPREHENSIVE video of the oven from putting the wood in to having it ready for pizza so i'll get that up on youtube and post the link asap.

FIRE ! wood fired pizza oven

One of the big questions is "how much wood?" followed by how long does it take to heat up? and won't the floor be dirty? Well this post will tell you what I discovered.

This was our 4th firing and we had previousley only achieved smoke !!! seriously we just created a mess !!

On reflection it was mainly caused by 4 factors, firstly green wood, next damp wood , then being to scared to create a ROARING fire and finally not preheating the oven for long enough.

There is just no formula for how long this all takes as your oven walls may be thinner or thicker then mine, I have a tunnell shape you may have a dome, how high is your oven inside? what bricks did you use? etc etc etc so I'll just tell you what happened to us and in just 1 day we produced a great pizza and NOW have alot of information about our oven, in 2 weeks we are having the official opening and based on what we achieved yesterday I am TOTALLY confident in predicting oven and pizza times.

First thing i did was gather HEAPS of good dry wood, kindling to logs and everything in between, i would say 40kgs of wood.

I stacked the oven full with wood using the "top burning theory" which means you put the kindling at the top instead of the bottom and it just "melts' down and creates the fire with very little effort by you. .... and it actuallt works.

So with the oven stacked we started at 12.30pm and feed the fire till 2.30pm, the entire oven was a blase of flames and we stocked it as we went.

Let your fire die down sometimes and stoke it, you will be amazed that a new incredible flame appears without adding wood. Also its a good chance to rotate the charcoal produced to make sure everything turns into coals and now just black cubes of wood.

The fire continued to burn untill 3pm and I was left with alot of coals and 1 piece of a large log giving off some small .

I spread the embers all oven the oven floor and kept most of the heat where i planned to cook the pizzas,

I pushed the embers to the back and righthand side then cleaned up the area, the oven was really hot at 3.30pm when i was cleaning the floor but we didn't put a pizza in it till 4pm.

How I cleaned the floor is I pushed everything aside, gave it a brush and then wiped it with a DRY cloth wrapped around a "garden hoe" type utensil. THEN just before we were cooking I spread flour onto the floor and watched it brown, they say the speed inwhich it browns gives you a good guide to the heat of the floor, the flour browned INSTANTLY at 3.30pm so thats why we waited till 4pm, I then pushed that flour into the fire and thus you have a clean floor without ash etc. After a couple of pizzas the floor is really really clean but we had no grit in the first pizza so the system works.

What was the temperature???? Well i haven't a clue, we don't have a temp gauge that goes that hot yet so i used my hand to tell the temperature, I put my hand into the oven and counted how long i could stand it, at 2.30pm it was a milli-second, at 3pm it was 1 second, at 4pm it was 3 seconds. This drop was mainly because I was beating the fire down into hot coals.

The pizza cooked in 6 minutes at 4pm which is 3.5hours after we started and 1.5 hours after we stopped fueling the fire, although the fire was still present till 3pm.

At 5 pm it was 4 seconds and 6pm it was 5 seconds BUT at 7pm it was still 5 seconds so the drop in heat was slowing down, 8pm 6 seconds and 9pm 7 seconds.

I think that we would have been best to cook the pizzas at @ 5.30pm instead of 4pm, we wouldn't get a 6minute pizza but we feel we would get a better crust and more even cook, plus the pizzas would be considtant over a longer period of time

And here is the pizza, a work of art !!

Of course after the pizzas there are still more uses for the heat, like great bread.

Vermiculite dry

heres a close up of the vermiculite a week latter, its small beads with some loose on top, i don't think it would stand up to bad weather so i'm going to pop some concrete ontop and then render it a colour.

Vermiculite Layer

Put the vermiculite/cement mix on, next week I'll cement render over it and that big grey side wall.

I found heaps of different ways of what you should do with the vermicement but this is what i did (which was one of the suggestions) in your wheel barrow put in 6 ten litre buckets of vermiculite, then toss through 1 ten litre bucket of cement until its thoroughly mixed, then using a watering can with a sprinkler rose slowly add water until it all becomes workable/tacky , this for me meant that i could pick it up in a hand ful and not have it crumble.

What actually happened was it took alot more water then i thought to achive this, @ 15+ litres. THEY all say to be careful with adding the water as you do not want to much.

Anyway, i then shoveled it ontop and smoothed it out, they all say don't squash it so at times balls of it ran off like little dung-beetle balls.

what i did was get my square trowl and hold it "downhill" so as i smoothed it down the side i also blocked it from falling off. The bag of vermiculite i bought still has @ a third left in it.

The clay layers have been cold to touch when firing the oven so this layer seems pointless but it was the plan !!

Chimney views

Its hard to tell but there are bricks up there, photo below.
sorry about the white frame, its just a quick way to throw a shelter over for me on hot days.


















heres the top view of how th ebricks go through the corrigated roof.