PIZZA DAY! - The Most Amazing PIZZA In A BRICK OVEN!
Every homestead needs a pizza oven. Let me just declare that right now. The very best pizza's are made inside wood fired brick ovens and really anyone can build one.
Each year during our fall feast, we have a pizza day and each guess is instructed to bring their own toppings that they want on their pizzas. Each person gets two personal size pizzas with toppings they provide. We provide the dough, sauce and of course the oven.
The designs for building such an oven can be found on a website called brickwoodovens.com. They provide the PDF plans for free but sell you the template mold to help you build the oven.
As you can see from our oven, some of the outer bricks have started to separate and this is because we chose a cheaper mortar for the outside bricks. The inside bricks were assembled with fire mortar mix and have held up pretty good. At some point in the near future, we will need to pull the outside bricks and chip off the cheaper mortar and reassemble them. A project for another day.
The outdoor kitchen is used to assemble all the dough and pizzas. The dough is made fresh that very day that the pizzas are made.
Jaimie and her helper @jeejee busy at work making dough for all the campers at the feast! Over 200 pizzas will be made today in a span of about 5 hours.
Once the dough is made, it is then spread on pine boards that are coated with flour on the bottom so that the pizza can easily slide off into the oven.
The campers are called up one family at a time. They assemble their pizzas on the pine boards and then stand in line waiting for entry into the oven.
One of the campers, Sabrina stands with her pizza ready to go into the oven. That looks like its going to be a nice pizza!
INTO THE OVEN! The pizzas are slid into the oven 2 at a time and it takes less than 2 minutes for each pizza to cook. Once the bread has risen and cheese on top has started to boil and brown, the pizza is finished! Oven temps during cooking can reach 900 degrees F.
Finally! You can eat! Maybe its the bricks or the wood smoke, but this produces the best tasting pizza you have ever had. There is no comparison to a brick wood fired pizza oven.
Are you interested in your own oven? Brickwoodovens.com has the instructions, templates and encouragement to undertake this project for your own homestead. Check them out and let them know you heard about their ovens from An American Homestead!
Enjoy the PIZZA!
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What do you have going on with water catchment there? It looks like the rainwater goes to smaller barrel first, but I can't figure out how it then gets to the bigger tank, unless is a valve that you change by hand or something.
Also, love the hand pump on the well. What brand? We are about to install a Bison pump here. Also just working on a 26' x 84' greenhouse...got the bows and purlins up today - it's amazing! Pics to come once I get to it!
Bison is a good pump. Lots of people using those. We chose the simple pump. Both have great reviews. I'll do a post at some point on just rain catchment. thanks for commenting!
YES EXACTLY. After building our cob wood-fired oven, we'll never, ever be able to go back to anything else. Andrew and I haven't pinpointed the exact Thing that makes it so good--like you said, a combination of the smoke or bricks or wood--but it is SO GOOD. Your pineboard assembly "plate" is brilliant--that would certainly make our guests-over-for-pizza-nights go a little more smoothly! Gonna take that idea.
The pine boards are big help. We just make sure to use lots of flour and make sure that sauce never hits the board. Then it slides right off into the oven.
It is an Italian speaking -with high standards of pizza - and I wish I could try your pizza out.
This how they used to make pizzas back in Italy.
Awesome. Pizza/bread/wood fired oven is definitely on the list of shorter-term goals here, but we may go cob style. I do have a bunch of bricks lying around for the base though.
The big bummer is that I'm not eating pizza right now because I'm off gluten and yeast for a bit! So, it's a dream for another day.
Great work!
You can find firebrick sometimes cheap on craigslist. Just have to keep an eye out.
Mmmmm mmmm good!!! Fun times!
Thanks for all your help!
We are planning on a cob oven which works the same way. What changes would you make now that you have some experience?
Just make sure you make your oven big enough. We chose to go bigger and we are glad we did.
Wow..that was so creative,every year doing a fall feast of pizza are very interesting..
More pizza bon apettite!
Shared to twitter!
OOHH they look amazing!
That looks good!