How do you build a clay oven?

Answer 1

== == For me, all this is about eating wonderful foods prepared by our selves and cooked using a little fire in a wood burning Pizza-bread traditional oven. It's visually very pleasing, interesting, as well as efficient and economical. Your friends will be so impressed they will probably follow you by building something suspicious in their homes. Cook meats, roasts, casserole dishes, bake cakes and never have to clean the grease inside the oven → ever! It'll burn in the oven's hearth! A wood burning pizza/bread oven is an oven made out of clay adobe, refractory fire bricks or refractory concrete (heat resistant mix made from ingredients that can withstand prolonged high heat conditions). Traditionally, ovens were made using material that wasn't costly and was easy to obtain in nature. Nowadays, we have everything we need to build a wood oven readily available in most refractory and building store yards. Traditional wood burning pizza-bread ovens and cooking using a gentle fire are simply 'the low TEC highly efficient technology'. So primitive and interesting, it will not let us down. A fire is built inside the oven (now you may say: 'I know that, but what's next?' - just kidding). The fire burns, giving off the heat which the heavy oven walls absorb. When the dome chamber inside is heated to flat white-hot, the fire is allowed to die down or kept burning only very gently for longer. The embers can be swept out of the oven or left somewhere aside in the oven. During the firing, the oven door is open and the flue at the chimney, if there is a chimney, is also left open. When we stop the fire and the embers are swept out of the oven, the door and/or the chimney are closed. The wood oven is then let to rest for a few minutes to allow the heat in the dome to even out, and for the temperature from the fire to drop down a bit. At first, the oven is around 800°F or 425°C perfect for making fast in 90 seconds thin and crispy pizzas, however very nice pizzas are being done also in 300°C - 572°F temp, but it's still too hot for bread. When the temperature has dropped to around 450°F or 230°C, then it is time to put big roasts and other large meals in. Bread goes in last so it doesn't bake too fast on the outside. If needed convert temperature scales with the automatic calculator. Pizza, bread, cakes, sausages, meat, cookies bake from the heat of the wood fire stored in the walls of the wood oven. Heat is spread around by radiating out of every heat source (it's a physical law called blackbody radiation, as in our sun or electric radiator). All of the heat absorbed in by the oven walls is now slowly radiating out, spreading around and working for us.

You can read more about the wall mass and the importance of a back up heat insulation later in these pages. Complete tutorial with pictures on how to make a good pizza

Nice pizza dough recipe that works well. = How long can you cook in a wood burning oven? = This depends on how well the dome of our wood oven is insulated on the outside, and also on how much wall mass the oven has, see(?), here you go. After heating up the very massive oven walls get hot enough to cook easily for a whole day. Traditionally, we cook with the oven's radiant heat, placing foods into the oven right as the temperature reaches the stage appropriate for the food. These ovens were traditionally used also to dry fruits, mushrooms, herbs or the firing wood for the next firing if it's fresh or too wet from the rain. They produce very useful low temperatures as well as hot cooking environments. Wood ovens, particularly ovens made using firebricks, have domes that are only about 4 inches thick (10 cm). If well insulated on outside, then this is perfectly satisfactory for pizza and then short time baking. But once you decide to build your own wood burning oven and after pizza do long time baking or large meats slow roasting, consider making the walls up to 6 inches (15 cm) thick by adding on 2 inches concrete cladding layer, such brick ovens will stay hot enough to cook for at least 6 hours using the heat energy generated at pizza making time (it's a worthy project and heaps of fun). Your oven will be a lot more efficient and stronger. You may need to heat it up a little longer, but those 20 minutes and a few bucks extra for concrete gravel etc. will pay you well off and you will be more happy in the end. To be stable even every quality Commercial pizza oven and Conveyor oven use dense layers on hot face.

In restaurants, we can watch the small fire inside a wood oven. They operate their ovens this way in order to maintain even temperature over a long period of time. You know how happy the owner is to use their wood burning oven; it changes the whole situation a lot for them. Basically, they operate wood oven the way a "modern" oven is operated except the fuel is a firewood and the shapes are different. Wood burning pizza ovens have temperatures normally higher in the ceiling above and the floor is normally cooler (another physical law, convection, says heat is inclined to go up). This cooks pizza in about 90 seconds, leaving it with no burnt edges or bottom of the pizza base. It is impossibly expensive to maintain this temperature for a long periods of time in gas or electric ovens, and it's also not environmentally friendly to use modern conventional appliances*. Restaurant wood burning ovens are being used primarily for pizza and are being kept at a lower temperature because they keep the fire on and these ovens still cook fast. They are extremely easy to run, and guess what- They do not have to be cleaned from grease! Grease in the oven burns out on it's own. Now, if you have ever cleaned your busy oven at home, you know how this works. Why is pizza best from a wood burning oven? See this page link:

Making pizza traditional way, by using small fire * I will write in here also about wood naturally rotting when left on the ground produces as much of the same bad gases as burning it, and how much of this gas the actual tree absorbed in it's body when alive, the same amount that goes out in burning it. About burning a coal in power stations and it's carbon, or about controlled bush fires and sugar cane burning. If you are just going to bake bread, then you should operate your oven the traditional way, with embers left to die or swept out of the wood pizza bread oven. This is the only way you can build up the steam inside the oven to give you the ultimate crust. But if you are baking pizza and making foods for dinner, roasting a chicken, a leg of lamb, potatoes, baking a pie, etc., then I suggest keeping a small fire in the oven, as they do in restaurants. This makes it very easy. After that, put your breads in and close the wooden oven's door which has been soaked in a bucket of water. You may watch oven's temperature using an oven thermometer to see how hot you are. But you don't really have to go into the expense of buying a thermometer. How to figure this out is easy, please read my tutorial on how to find out how hot your wood oven is, the traditional sure way as I used to do it. Now I don't really check the temperature any more, and you will not need too either after cooking for the third time. As per home ovens, the longest time I have seen is 2 hours for an oven being fired- it was a big family home oven holding heat comphortably for 40 breads surface area, whole lamb or 6 roasting pots with lids for big turkeys. Backyard or house wood burning ovens will be fully heated up in 1 to 1 1/2 hours. This is the aim. There is an early phase in the firing when the oven can smoke as you start it- it lacks fire kick start, it has thermal inertia. This is minimized by using dry wood, thin kindling, and blowing air into it. As the fire builds up in temperature, the gasses given off by the burning wood will ignite and the whole oven will be filled with flames not smoke. It is important when you build the oven to make the flue and the chimney correctly as they draw off and direct the exhaust, and it is very important to calculate carefully the ratio of the entry door height to the inside dome vault height for proper burning. Waste wood, old furniture, branches from trees, these are all sources of firing wood. You may want to split larger pieces, I do. But burn natural wood- don't burn wood that is painted or soaked with chemicals. = Can I build a wood burning pizza oven? = Diy building a wood oven can be simple or complex, depending on what you would like to build. You can tend towards the simple side at first for testing the cooking or build proper oven right from start. First wood burning oven may even be built using cleaned old solid red clay building bricks, one can get them for free or build such oven for less than 150 bucks. But proper and lasting oven can be completed from around 650 bucks if no special/expensive decorative materail was applied. I placed here detailed workshop plans on cds full of information for building a few oven designs: simple ones and more advanced, tutorials, and complete instructions on diy and building your own chef cook wood ovens. Here is a first one: a good quality wood burning brick oven. I am working on it while building and taking pictures of each stage as in my other tutorials here in this traditionaloven.com site. Here is a next oven I call Masterly wood oven ® with a nice brick decorations technique for people who never laid a brick before will find this very easy way (oven has special firebrick part) - its outside walls are calling for imperfections visually effective - even for experienced bricklayers. The oven has revolutionary dome design I put immense work into- structurally high quality, spacious, easy to form into any desired size but in contrast nearly no need for cutting firebricks! If you'd like to own an oven like the one mentioned above or any other size or shape, but have no time to build by your self, make an offer and we can consult further.

I will be delighted to hear any wood oven building suggestions that you may have. Thank you and enjoy. Rado (This oven relies on an abundance of clay soil being readily available)

This oven is manufactured from clay, and some stick formers.

The oven was designed to be used out-doors and will provide baking facilities for a small group's daily needs.

It is created in two parts, the fire pit area and then the oven area.

The structure is straightforward and incorporates a wooden frame as a former which will burn out leaving the fire pit first and adobe oven secondly, ready to use.

The chimney can be made from an adobe mix and fire dried.

Building the oven

Using pliable twigs or strong grasses, make a structure that resembles the shape of the pictures above. Make an adobe mix from soil with a good amount of clay mixed in. If you have cement available, so much the better. Plaster the mix all over the outside of the frame to a uniform depth of about 2 inches. You can check the depth by pushing a match stick through the wall. Smooth off the outside of the wall with a damp trowel or similar tool.

Allow the structure to dry a little. Place wood and kindling inside the oven and light. Keep the fire going by adding more wood - but slowly, you don't want to blow the oven apart through having a furnace. You just want to "cook" the clay with a hot, but not fierce heat.

When the oven is fully dried and the stick formers have been burned out you can use the oven and bake bread.

Some experimentation may be needed depending on the quality of the clay in the soil. Cement paving slabs have successfully been used for the oven floor if the clay is weak or of poor quality.