Pizza Oven Building: 6 Mistakes to Avoid
A pizza oven building can give you the taste of Italy in your own backyard. Forget the BBQ and invite your friends over for pizza instead. Here are 6 things to avoid when building your own.
1. Choose a Plot Carefully
It is important to choose the correct location for the pizza oven, otherwise it could cause a safety hazard. Ensuring the building is on flat land will make it easier to build. Avoid an area full of shrubbery and trees. Some towns may have rules about how close the oven can be to the home.
2. Take Care with the Size
People often build the oven too big for the purpose. The oven only has to be big enough for a pizza to fit inside. If you estimate your dimensions wrong, you may find the oven takes to long to heat up and the air does not conduct as well. This makes the cooking quality of your pizza oven worse.
3. Cap the Flue
Every pizza oven building needs a flue so that the exhaust gases can escape for the building in a safe and controlled manner. If you leave the flue open, objects could fall down the flue and damage your oven or block it, so it is important to cap it. You can buy caps from most hardware stores or secure an upside-down wok as a cheap, homemade version.
4. Curved Inner Oven
The oven has 2 layers. The inner oven needs to be a specific shape, but it does not matter about the outer oven. If the inner oven is not curved, the heat will not conduct around the space correctly and you will waste energy. This means that it will be harder to get the oven to the ideal temperature of 600°F.
5. Do not Cook Immediately
Once the pizza oven building has been built, it will be tempting to invite your friends over and cook a few pizzas. However, in order to not damage the building then you need to gradually bake the inside of the oven. First, create a small fire and let it burn out. Next, increase the size of the fire and let it burn out until you are content that the inside of the oven has been baked.
6. Control the Temperature
A homemade pizza oven should have 2 thermometers: one in the baking chamber and one on the hearth. These should be monitored during the cooking process to ensure that the pizza oven building is heated to the correct temperature for the best cooking conditions, estimated to be around 600°F. This works on a similar basis as when you preheat a conventional oven. If the temperature gets exceptionally high then this could indicate that the flue is blocked on the pizza oven building.
