Thread: Building a pizza oven

Thanks for the cost estimate. I reckon the labor for just the pizza oven and counter would run at least 10,000 baht around here.

I think I could show my chang how to do it from your pics and other do-it-yourself vids on You Tube.

A few days later Mr. Chaang and his boys came to build a roof from various offcuts we had lying around, and render the walls.

The finished product seen from the bedroom:



...and from ground level:







I'm very happy at how it turned out, it's become a great little evening lounging about spot.

Originally Posted by Humbert

Thanks for the cost estimate. I reckon the labor for just the pizza oven and counter would run at least 10,000 baht around here.

No problem, as I say the key to it is to find someone who is a half decent stonemason. The thing is so far away from normal building that it confuses builders.

Originally Posted by Humbert

I think I could show my chang how to do it from your pics and other do-it-yourself vids on You Tube.

Brilliant - give it a go Humbert, once you embark on the project then it all seems to fall into place. Other than skill in brick cutting it mainly just needs time and some common sense.

Looking forwards to seeing Humbert's pizza oven thread - and Loy Toys...!

Good job....does the dog ever jump in it ?

Brilliant set up. Just wonderful and I would think that many others will be copying that very soon.

Looks fantastic in the finish

Did you have a vision of this completed or was it kinda suck it and see ?

Originally Posted by Nawtier

Good job....does the dog ever jump in it ?

No, but the cat likes to escape hide from the children and I have found it happily curled up in there before. It's nice, cool and shaded in there in the daytime.

Originally Posted by pseudolus

Brilliant set up. Just wonderful

Thanks

Originally Posted by pseudolus

I would think that many others will be copying that very soon

I hope so, as Humbert said at the beginning of the thread it's a great sort of centre of social activity. The pizza-making is largely incidental. I'd recommend it to anyone willing to give it a go.

Originally Posted by nigelandjan

Did you have a vision of this completed or was it kinda suck it and see ?

Pretty much suck it and see. I sort of knew that I needed to hide the oven in the slope of the hill a little to reduce the crematorium look, but I really had no idea how it would turn out other than that. It was just what was available either lying around at home or in the local shops that dictated the look and to some extent the layout.

What kind of brick/stone finish did you put on the walls, Roobarb. It looks great!

The proof they say is in the pudding, or in this case the pizza, so I would be remiss I think if I didn't include a photo or two of the thing in action.


Ingredients beginning to assemble:




Fire's lit, a couple of chickens happily roasting away under some aluminium foil to the left:




Rolling out the pizza dough on the floor-tile counter top:




Pizza and chicken doing their stuff:




Bit of a close up of the action:




Pair of roasted chooks:




The Baht 35,000 pizza:




This was a fairly early attempt at cooking, a proof of concept if you like. Over time you get to learn better ways to use the oven but for now it's the satisfaction that I built the thing - and it actually works!

Looks a fine prototype.
Brilliant thead. Thanks for sharing.

Just as a footnote, as some have mentioned, mine may be a somewhat over the top method of cooking pizza.

At the other end of the scale I came across a far simpler, and equally effective pizza oven:

1) Get yourself a non-galvanised metal dustbin/garbage can and bury it in a mound of earth. You now have a cooking chamber and insulation:



2) Light a fire in the back of the garbage can, then put a ceramic tile in the front part. Let the tile warm up for 10 minutes of so and then slide on your pizzas:



3) Grab a beer, congratulate yourself on you ingenuity and a minute or so later you have this:



To be honest their pizzas look every bit as good as the one I cooked, and getting there was a lot less hassle. I loved the simplicity of it.

The full story is here:

Garbage Can Pizza Oven

Whether you choose to build a brick oven like mine, a mud oven like Nawty's or simply to cook a pizza in a bin covered in earth, do have a go at it - it's great fun and the results are often surprisingly good.

Good luck...!

Excellent roob very impressed and now very hungry

Fantastic job. How long did it take from start to finish.

Originally Posted by Neverna

What kind of brick/stone finish did you put on the walls, Roobarb. It looks great!

Thanks Neverna - it's just standard stone cladding that you can get at lots of building supplies places. It's real stone but about 15mm thick, so you just sort of glue it onto the rendered walls - thinking about it you may not need to render the walls first...? Using it was something of an afterthought so by the time I'd gone down that route our walls were already rendered.

The stone on the walls and counters came from the local cement seller in the village.

The larger ones going up the top sides of the oven housing I got from a roadside place that sells marble countertops nearby. It's just a big one glued next to a little one, then a little one glued next to a bigger one etc going up the wall.

This is just excellent Roob !!!


Nicely Done .



Wasp

How long to cook the chook ?........to cook pizza its supposedvto be really high temp...cook quick, like under 2min.......woulda thought same temp to much for chook, to thick, just burn the outside and not cooked inside......

Originally Posted by Nawtier

really high temp

would it be worthwhile to embed a temp probe / or maybe better a thermowell for a temp probe during the construction ?

The pizza looks fantastic. So much better than the feeble versions I make in my oven.

Roob's. Looking at your initial start, the oven looked very close to the ground.
Did you excavate more soil later on?

BTW. Looks fantastic...Better then porn!

Originally Posted by Nawtier

How long to cook the chook ?........to cook pizza its supposedvto be really high temp...cook quick, like under 2min.......woulda thought same temp to much for chook, to thick, just burn the outside and not cooked inside......

The chickens were in there for about two hours. They sat in a tin on a layer of vegetables and under aluminium foil for a lot of the time so they had the warmth without really having contact with the base of the oven or the circulating air. Once I took the aluminium foil off then they started to crisp up on top (or more accurately, burn).

I think there are two things going on with cooking a pizza. The bread base is cooked by the stone floor. The fire heats the stone and its the stone that cooks the base. The cheese on top is melted by the circulating hot air, it's like putting it in a mini blast furnace.

When I took the photos the oven was fairly new and we were still running the thing in - the advice is that you give it a chance to properly dry out before really giving it the beans. Pizzas were taking about 4 minutes back then, so I guess we were a way off optimal temperature at the time.

Originally Posted by charleyboy

Roob's. Looking at your initial start, the oven looked very close to the ground.
Did you excavate more soil later on?

BTW. Looks fantastic...Better then porn!

Thanks Charley. We didn't excavate - or at least I don't think we did, I wasn't there when the guys laid the brick floor. The thing is that once you've built the base you then need to pour a 4" concrete slab followed by a 4" vermiculite insulating slab. The firebricks themselves add another 3" give or take, so your pizza oven cooking floor is about a foot/30 cms above the top of the bricks making up the base. The base is four Thai sized breezeblocks high, and I think they are each, give or take, 20 cms tall so that added to the slab, insulation and firebricks gives you a cooking floor height of about 110 cms / 43". I've not actually measured mine so I have no idea how it turned out.

If you look at the proportions of the doorway in the stand underneath the oven when it is being built against the shape of the door on it once the thing was completed it looks if anything as if the floor was raised a little. (which I think it was because of the issue with the way the steps were built). It's a bit of a guess though...

Not sure with a brick oven...but would presume same would/should be good for it....but curing it with small fires first....over a half dozen or more fires over several days.....increase to the final full roaring high temp fire for longer period....

Originally Posted by Nawtier

Not sure with a brick oven...but would presume same would/should be good for it....but curing it with small fires first....over a half dozen or more fires over several days.....increase to the final full roaring high temp fire for longer period....

Yup, spot on. You need to give the mortar time to dry out gradually. Whilst we fuel it with random bits of wood left over from building the house, it does take a fair amount of wood to get it to the truly roaring, 2 minute pizza stage so generally we're OK with it being a bit cooler and the pizzas taking a bit longer.

As with building the thing, practically speaking the running of it is a colossal waste of time and resources for what is really only there to produce a couple of pizzas in an evening. Liken it to owning a muscle car - great fun when your mates are over, and for a bloke it's obviously worth every penny spent on it, but a Honda Civic is (it pains me to admit) might be the more sensible solution for every day use.