GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: pizza oven

Pizza Oven Brick, How To Store It

I just pulled a bunch of pizza oven brick out of a dumpster in Brooklyn. The contractors were taking down the parapet wall of a crumbling building near my house. I walked down with my hand truck. The crew were happy to help me sort out a ton of excellent brick.

When I say pizza oven brick, I mean old school clay brick. We talk about this a bit in our pizza oven videos, but we can expand here. We don’t use fire brick in our home made pizza oven, we use used clay bricks. These old kind that we salvage from construction sites or we find online. I wrote about how to find used brick here.

People have asked about the potential for bad things being in the brick that one doesn’t want touching their pizza dough. From what I understand, that potential is low to non-existent, because the pizza dough is only on the brick for a very short time. Not long enough to absorb anything, in my opinion, as long as the brick is clean.

How To Store Pizza Oven Brick

The beauty of our home made pizza oven is you can break it down. But, you have to store the brick somewhere. I learned the hard way that just leaving them out in the yard is bad. Over the winter, the bricks got wet, consequently, they froze and cracked over the winter. Bad Bricks!

Snow and Rain will damage your bricks, don’t do this.

So here is how I now store pizza oven brick.

Grab two pallets, probably an easy thing if you are a GardenFork sort of person. Plan where you are going to store your brick. Ideally, this is not under the overhang of a shed, because we don’t want more water than necessary near the brick. Learn from me…

Plenty of space between the bricks

Put one pallet down on the ground, and stack the bricks on the pallet with air space between them. Because if the bricks do get wet, they can dry out. If they are stack tight together, they wont dry out as well.

Place another pallet of the same size on top of the loosely stacked bricks. Finally, cover the whole stack with a waterproof tarp.

What I have found is the tarp can pool water, so I make sure the side of the pallet with more cross pieces is facing up. Unlike the photo above… It wouldn’t hurt to slide a piece of scrap plywood over the top pallet, then the tarp.

Homemade Brick Pizza Oven Video

December 28, 2017
How To Find Used Brick For A Pizza Oven

People have been asking me how to find used brick for building our DIY pizza oven plan, so as I just found some more brick today, I can share with you how to do this.

The best way is to look around for construction demolition projects going on in your area. Ask you friends if they know of any work being done. I was lucky today to walk down the block to find a crew taking down a brick wall of a building. They were happy to get rid of some brick.

Used Brick sits well in those plastic organizer crates, but make sure they aren’t the cheap flimsy kind.

Perfect reason to ride your bike around, so go look into construction dumpsters and find used brick.

If there aren’t brick buildings near you, check out Craigslist. You’d be surprised how had a pile of brick that they want to get rid of.

You will probably pay more for clean brick, so keep in mind when you want to clean brick and when you to just pay for brick that has already been cleaned.

The issue of using used clay brick has been debated quite a bit. I have used it for several pizza ovens and I am fine with it. You can make your own choice. For pizza, we are not heating up the brick for hour after hour to build heat, we are creating a space to hold fire for a short period to cook some dough and cheese.

How do you find used brick? Let me know below.

November 8, 2016
Homemade Metal Pizza Oven

Here is a home made pizza oven I ran across in a restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Can’t remember the name of the place, sorry.

This one is interesting in that its a metal pizza oven, rather than the usual brick. I did not see it in operation, but I’m sure it works.
I do see some improvements that can be made to this home made pizza oven, and I wonder why they did some thing.
The two side openings are where one would put the firewood to fire the oven. They don’t seem large enough to build a fire that would sustain itself and heat up the oven enough. I didn’t see this rig in action, so it may work just fine, but I’m thinking not.

There is a curved metal arch over the pizza platter. I guess this is to channel the heat up over the pizza, and transfer heat to the metal arch. I’d remove the arch. The heat from the two side fires will naturally move across the roof the oven and out the center flue.
The pizza platter is too big, I’m thinking. I don’t often see fire baked pizzas that large. With a smaller platter, the whole pizza can fit in the oven, and you don’t have to turn it.
But its an interesting idea, not sure who built it and how well it works in practice. I love that someone took the time to make it. Clearly some welding and metal skills here.

July 14, 2015
More Brick Pizza Oven Plans & Photos

Here are additional photos of our DIY brick pizza plans. Easy to make and break down, you can build a pizza oven in a few hours and be making pizza in the oven tonight. Note the sturdy table the brick oven is on, this thing is heavy!

I used two pieces of tile backer board on top of a 1″ plywood base for the pizza oven. Use the cleanest bricks you have for the floor of the oven.

Recycled bed frames are become the angle iron to hold up the roof of the oven. The paint on the metal angle iron will burn off quickly.

Detail of how the angle iron sits on top of the side walls.

The back of the oven can be confusing, I used some extra brick to provide extra support.

I made a DIY pizza peel for our DIY pizza oven! Watch the Pizza Peel video here.

Use hardwood to fire the oven, charcoal will not work. Leave some logs burning as you cook the pizzas, you need the constant heat from the wood fire to cook the pizzas.

See More Pizza Oven Assembly Photos Here

Watch all of our pizza oven and pizza dough recipes here

Our backyard pizza oven is based on one in the book Bread , Earth, & Fire by Stuart Silverstein. Stuart’s book has a bunch of plans and info on building backyard ovens, go buy it here. it is available as an ebook or paperback. Read Stuart’s blog here.

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May 21, 2015
DIY Pizza Oven Tips and Tricks – GF Video

Using our easy brick pizza oven plan, learn these tips for building your wood fired pizza oven and how to cook pizza in it. After using our DIY pizza oven several times, I wanted to share with you all some things I have learned about firing the brick oven and cooking pizza in it. If you haven’t watched our how to build a portable brick pizza oven, check it out here.

Planning helps a lot to have a successful brick oven pizza night. I suggest you start assembling the oven 4 hours ahead of time, and starting the fire 3 hours ahead.

Build the pizza oven on a strong base. Don’t use flimsy sawhorses, they will break! Again, learn from my mistakes here…

Start your pizza dough at least 24 hours ahead of time, if possible. You can check out our pizza dough recipe videos here. If this is a spontaneous pizza night, go ahead and use the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day dough recipe. It all tastes good!

Don’t burn green wood. Learn from my mistakes! I grabbed a bunch of kindling that I did not realize was green, and had to rebuild the fire after it didn’t start well. Oak works best, I think.

Rake most of the coals to the back of the oven, and then throw another large log onto the coals, you need to keep the fire going for multiple pizzas.

Our homemade pizza peel works great with the brick pizza oven, watch the pizza peel video here. Use cornmeal on the pizza peel, it helps the pizza slide off the peel onto the oven floor.

Rotate the pizza halfway through the baking process, it helps to even out the cooking.

Don’t pile on the ingredients, less is better in this case. Vegetables should be sliced thin. Vegetables such as broccoli are best blanched first, so they cook along with the pizza. You can also add things after the pizza comes out of the oven.

Here is the how to build the brick pizza oven video:

Click here to see some of the pizza ovens people have built after watching our how-to vids, have you built one? Please send us pictures: [email protected]

November 20, 2013
Pizza Oven Plans by Kathlean Video

GardenFork Viewer Kathlean made a brick pizza oven based on our How to make a backyard brick oven video, and put together this great video of how she made a pizza oven out of brick. Kathlean found the brick on freecycle.org, which is brilliant – i’m all about use what you got, and these bricks fit the bill. These bricks have holes in them, our brick oven bricks did not, but Kathlean puts the holes to good use, making the roof of the oven out of brick and black pipe that slides through the brick and supports it.

We’ve gotten a bunch of photos of back yard pizza and bread ovens, and i plan on putting together a photo gallery of the backyard ovens people have made inspired by our brick oven. Next on my list is an enhanced oven to bake bread. I need to increase the mass of the oven with more brick, and make a door to cover the front opening. Then we’ll heat up the oven with firewood to about 700F, let the fire die down, and slide in some loaves of bread. Neat.

Have you built a brick, stone, or cob oven? I’d like to hear about it, you can leave comments below:

December 5, 2012
Pizza Oven Plans & Photos from Steven of Tiny House Listings

Here is a different take on the portable backyard pizza oven by Steven of TinyHouseListings.com . Steven sent me these photos of the brick pizza oven he built. Here’s Steve’s note to us:

I love your website and loved the post on your pizza oven. After I saw it I posted a wanted ad on Craigslist for clay fire bricks and the next day went to pick up 100 of them from a fellow for free.

I played around with the bricks in my back yard and came up with a way to setup an oven with no mortar, no rails, no nothing except stacked bricks. My wife and I cooked 4 pizzas last night and they turned out nicely.

Since it was my first time setting up something like this it was a little crooked (you can tell especially in the pic from behind) but I plan to take it down and restack it. One other recommendation I would make should you decide to take this approach is to make the oven about two or three layers of bricks deeper to allow more heated air to circulate over the pizza. My oven is only 4 layers deep since I ran out of bricks! Once I get a couple more I’ll make it deeper.

When building it be sure to build all of the layers of the wall together. In other words, lay all bricks down for each row on the entire side of the wall, then move up to the next layer so they bricks can rest on each other for support.

I think its brilliant that Steven posted a ‘wanted’ ad on craigslist looking for bricks, I had not thought of doing that, I kept looking in craigslist for people offering bricks. Smart.

Dry Fit Pizza Oven by Steven

rear view of pizza oven

Fire = Good

Other Pizza Oven Plans and Photos Posts on GardenFork:

Brick Pizza Oven Video and Plans GF TV video

Brick Oven Plans and Photos from a GardenFork Fan

Pizza Oven Photos from John

Backyard Brick Oven Discussion! GF Radio

Homemade Pizza Recipe : Christmas Eve

How to make a bread peel or pizza peel : Gardenfork.tv

February 8, 2012
Backyard Brick Oven Discussion! GF Radio

We talk about the Simple Backyard Brick Oven Plans and Video. The pizza oven construction is discussed, and how to source angle iron using freecycle techniques. Placement of the wood fire within the Brick Oven and the difference between our simple brick oven and those pizza ovens in a restaurant fill out the conversation. Its the perfect brick oven for a pizza party. Mike talks about the ritual of building the oven is akin to BBQ, the ritual of doing it. Having your friends help build the pizza oven when they come over to eat would be fun. How to cut Durock, a cement backer board used in the Brick Pizza Oven is best scored with a utility knife.

What kind of dough recipe to use in the pizza oven comes up. Eric used this pizza dough recipe and found it to be good.

Mike asks if people remember a mimeograph machine, and dates himself immediately, and talks about fishing in winter.

Monica joins us to talk about what Eric should make with what he has in his fridge, the consensus seems to be Mexican Casserole. We also talk about Monica’s trip to Los Angeles.

The 7 bone roast mystifies Eric, and Monica suggests visiting your local butcher who knows about meat. Stew meat, what kind to use, and how Monica and Mike make it is discussed, use what you got seems to be the theme here. Mike has a great suggestion to save food from catering platters, put them in the freezer and use them to make stews.

GardenFork Radio is now available on Stitcher Radio

January 22, 2012
Homemade Brick Pizza Oven Video

Build this homemade brick pizza oven in your backyard with recycled used clay bricks and a recycled metal mattress frame. And the pizza oven is portable! You can assemble this in 20 minutes, make homemade pizzas, then take it apart and store it. Most backyard pizza ovens are big and permanent, this homemade brick oven is great because its easy to break down again until your next pizza baking party.Here are the pizza oven plans shown in photos, our oven uses used clay brick and 24″ angle iron we cut from a old bed frame. You have to heat up the oven for an hour to get it up to temperature. The brick pizza oven has to be on sturdy sawhorses or cement blocks. We used cement tile board to insulate the plywood table from the heat of the brick oven. Stuart, author of the Bread Oven book, emailed us, cautioning that he felt the 2 layers of cement tile board was not enough insulation to keep the plywood from scorching, he suggests a base of cement, as shown on his blog here.

Clean the bricks that will be used for the floor of the oven, that’s where your pizza dough will be sitting. We didn’t have a thermometer, but I’m told the floor of the brick oven can reach 700F. We also found its good to keep some of the coals in the front part of the oven, so the heat is more even. We had to turn the pizza once during baking to have it cook evenly.

I have a few ideas for more modifications, which we will post later on. Keep children and animals away from this and all fires, this is for adults.

base of pizza oven

building walls of pizza oven

pizza oven roof using angle iron

Backyard Brick Pizza Oven

More Pizza Oven Plan Photos Here

Watch all of our pizza oven and pizza dough recipes here

Our backyard pizza oven is based on one in the book Bread , Earth, & Fire by Stuart Silverstein. Stuart’s book has a bunch of plans and info on building backyard ovens, go buy it here. it is available as an ebook or paperback. Read Stuart’s blog here.

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January 15, 2012