Pizza Oven
We made a pizza oven for our last wwoofing hosts in Auckland.
It took about 3 days from a kit supplied by this company.
For non kiwis, the materials would be fairly easy to source (fire bricks, sand, cement, mortar, pumice, fire tiles and a ceramic cooking tile). There are plenty of youtube tutorials such as this one for more info, and lots of diy kits out there.
A quick outline of the building process:
1. Prepare a concrete base. This could be using precast concrete slab or casting your own slab in formwork. We chose to make our own slab to allow for some interesting drainpipes to run underneath, and also give an extra shelf at the front for making the pizza!
2. Lay out the tiles and draw out the shape of your oven.
3. Using timber formwork make the interior arch and lay the first 2 courses of bricks for the oven.
4. Fill the centre of the oven with voluminous objects and the pumice to form the shape of the dome. This needs to be covered with wet newspaper to stop it sticking to the brickwork and mortar.
5. Complete the remainder of the brickwork dome and cover with the the mortar left over. Create the formwork for the exterior arch.
6. Cover with pumice mix and fix in flue.
We ate pizza baked in the oven in our last night in New Zealand and it was great – the pizza’s only took about 1 minute to cook and at least 20 were consumed! Now we just need to make one for ourselves…
