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Building a Wood Fired Pizza Oven

Wood fired pizza--who doesn't love it? And making a pizza oven is a great small scale natural building project. If all the materials are on hand, a team as small as three or four could do it easily in the space of a weekend. And even if you don't have a team, you can do it by yourself over the course of several consecutive weekends. (And I promise you, friends will come out of the woodwork when you start cooking up those pizzas!)

"Urbanite," or waste concrete, is often free for the hauling and can make a good base. When the city required us to redo several sections of sidewalk, we had all the base material we needed for our oven.

(For a complete list of materials needed, as well as quantities and instructions, check Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer.)


urbanite base, pizza oven

Mixing clay and sand for the first layer. >> Because my subsoil was mixed with topsoil, using it to build with would have been very difficult. So instead I got half a dozen buckets of waste clay from a local potter. Together with sand from a nearby quarry, the clay worked great!


wood fired oven, hand made pizza oven


First Fire!>>





I love this oven, but next time I build one I would like to try out the two chamber approach  outlined by Ernie and Erica. (They're supposed to make less smoke). 
broken concrete, urbanite


<<Urbanite foundation and the beginnings of cob construction.  (Cob is a mixture of clay, sand and--sometimes--straw.) If you live where the ground freezes in winter, you should dig down several feet to start your foundation.




mixing cob with feet, feet, clay

<<Working around the oven door makes it easy to get a good fit. Later on, when you are prepping the fire for cooking, you put the door on to soak in a bucket of water to help slow down the charring process.

clay pizza oven
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