Pizza Ovens - the actual oven July to September 2020

This whole process - and indeed my attempts at baking in general are documented on my instagram page - toastedtodestruction 

Thanks so much to Steve Sager for the suggestion of the insta handle. 

As mentioned in the previous blog, I got all the information and ideas about making this thing from here, so I'm not going to go through it with amounts of stuff in the same way as he does. This is mainly a record for me to see what actually happened.

So far- the slab and the wood store have been made. Concrete laying and brick laying have been, um, well, "experienced" is a far more honest word than "mastered". At this point the financial outlay started, getting a load of firebricks for the base, a shaped firebrick arch for the entrance, enormous amounts of vermiculite (the insulative material) a shed load of clay (raku, in case you were wondering) - luckily if we didn't use it all, Lynne is a potter and would have a load of extra clay to play with, and some fireproof mortar. 

I still didn't have anything to build a former for the actual oven. The guy in the aforementioned blog used the slats from a dead blind- but I didn't have anything like that. But we gleefully carried on anyway. 

14th July - in the shed, trying to work out how much space the floor would take up. Luckily we happened to have a sheet of fireboard left over from a previous thing which we could use for a base between the firebrick base and the lintels. 

Then I tried to put it all on the base and tried to work out how the fire brick arch would work. It looked very much like I'd need a bit of a former to make it stand upright while I cemented it.

 18th July - the first attempt at making a former. This involved the back of an old wardrobe (semi flexible cardboard type stuff and a LOT of gaffa tape.

To be honest, it was an unmitigated disaster. 

22nd July. Borrowed a Jigsaw from Mr Yates to attempt to cut out a former for the door. I was quite impressed with my ingenuity in making a kind of standing semi-circle thing in the form of one of those 3d dinosaurs you used to get. When I showed this picture to Dave his comment was "what did you do that with? a shovel?!". 

Nice. You can see why he is a teacher. 

25th July. Well, it might look like it was made with a shovel, but it looks like it is up to the job. Arch is cemented in place with heat-resistant cement. It took a fair amount of joggling and jiggery pokery - but it went up.

1st August - Astonishingly, at the end of July an advert came up on a Glossop facebook page for a blind that someone didnt want. I think they were a bit surprised when I turned up, didn't care what size or colour it was- but was very interested in just how bendy the slats were... perfect timing. I now had a load of blind slats and some gaffa tape, and some glorious weather in which to attempt to make an upside down basket weave...

This involved a fair amount of maths. Ok, not much maths, but I had to make sure that the top of the oven dome was at the correct height to allow heat to circulate and allow smoke out while still drawing in cold air to feed the fire. It's a fairly simple calculation and involves knowing how tall the inside of the arch is. Thanks to Tomcat for checking my maths. 

Next step involves some paper mache. 

2nd August - Neither Lynne nor I had made paper mache in a LONG time. Thankfully we were able to get some wallpaper paste from Tomcat and were soon gleefully getting our hands covered in glue and pages from Private Eye. 

 6th August - First layer of Clay. Because the clay was too, um, clay-like to just be whacked straight on the papermache layer we had to mix it with extra builders sand to make it more grogged. This took a fair amount of effort and time, but after going through a few 12.5kg bags of clay we got into a routine. By the time we finished, it looked AMAZING.

The main problem here is that although it looks great when damp, clay shrinks when it dries. Normally, this is not a problem as it just gets smaller. This is around a specific former and so as it dries, cracks appear. You fill up the crack. It cracks more. And so on and so forth for quite some time. I didn't take too many photos of the cracks appearing because it was just too depressing. We're talking a massive crack right along the spine, like it was going to split in two. It came away from the arch, there were cracks down the side, it came up from the brickwork. It looked awful. 

15th August. We'd spent the last week and a half filling in cracks, waiting for it to dry and shrink, to fill in more cracks etc. etc. I declared it about time to just get on with it - or else we'd spend the next month doing exactly the same and not getting anywhere. The next stage was the insulated layer. Clay, mixed with water and then with vermiculite folded in- then that gets spread/dumped across the entire oven. Hopefully creating an insulative layer that will hold heat for enough time to cook bread.

Clay, mixed with water- and then folding the vermiculite in gives it a curious texture. Don't be too rough when folding in the vermiculite- it needs air in it to retain the insulative properties.

Using blobs about 5cm deep to get a uniform depth all the way around.

You can see the seam where the crack has been repaired on the back of the oven here.

Yes. It was quite a messy process. 

 20th August. Oh no! Cracks are appearing in the vermiculite layer as well. Dammit. We hadn't anticipated this. This layer was meant to be a bit more flexible, a bit easier to handle. Apparently not. Cracks all over the place. So we tried to push it in a bit, reduce the amount of crackage.

Nightmare. The next layer is the concrete overlayer, so we didn't want to leave it like this. A bit more clay was used to fill in the cracks. 

31st August. Before we do the concrete layer though, it was time to look inside again- see how it was looking. All you could see was the semi-dry papermache (being outside, even under a tarp- it was still pretty damp). It was going to be time for the initial firing to get rid of the paper, glue and wooden former. Would it actually stay upright?

1st Sept - firing. It took a fair amount of encouragement to get going, but after a while, it really got going....

And. It stayed up. 

12th Sept. There was a bit of a hiatus while I got my eyes lasered, but then we had a look inside the oven and could see there was a fair amount of remedial work that needed to be done. ie. sodding great cracks that probably needed to be filled in. Unfortunately I had to wear sunglasses and protect my eyes from dust as much as possible, so Lynne got the fun job of crawling inside the oven. 

22nd Sept - we'd had a couple of small fires inside up to this point. The idea was to slowly dry the clay and the clay/vermiculite layer as slowly as possible. Big fires were not going to be a great idea straight away. You need to run the oven in. However, once we had done that, more cement was needed to finish off the top of the oven- more like render than cement, but close enough. We mixed it in small batches so that it stayed pliable while we put it on. I got some Chickenwire from Mr. Yates so that there was a bit of reinforcement within the cement.

It didn't take long for the first layer to dry - just a couple of hours, so we got stuck in and did the second layer that afternoon, and to celebrate, lit another fire. 

25th Sept - inauguaral cooking. Well. It's been quite an epic learning curve doing this, and there were a number of times when I genuinely thought we'd probably have an unfinished pizza oven sitting at the end of the garden for the next decade, staring at us accusingly. But no. On the 25th sept- 4 and a half months later we fired it up for food. It could have been made faster (especially if I actually knew what I was doing as opposed to making it up as I went along half the time), and if the weather had played ball a bit more, but there you go. 

First pizzas were shop bought ones- it seemed a bit silly to waste home made pizza in an oven that might just not work. But crikey. It worked. Crispy base. Cooked pizza. Amazing. 

I find it hard to believe that it's made and works. Mind you, it's autumn now, so I don't know quite how much use we're going to get out of it in the next few months. Hopefully a fair amount considering we're going to get a door- which means woodfired, stonebaked bread - and, with luck, roasts and casseroles etc. We'll just have to experiment.