How To Make A Pizza Oven For Your Garden

There is nothing better than eating a meal you make using your own home grown ingredients, unless perhaps it is eating a home grown meal made in a home-made oven in your beautiful garden! It is easier and cheaper than you might imagine to make your own small pizza oven from scratch. Read on to learn about how to create a DIY pizza oven for your garden.

Making Your DIY Pizza Oven

1. Dig to a depth of around 20cm to form a foundation for the structure.
2. Build a dry stone wall, brick or breeze block base to the height you want your oven to be less around 15cm.
3. Fill the inside of the base with glass wine bottles, stacked flat.
4. Cover the base with a 15cm thick layer of clay-rich mud and leave to dry.
5. Build a mound of wet sand (mixed with a little mud) to form the shape of your dome.
6. Cover the dome in newspaper to help make removing this material easier later on.
7. Mould cob material (mix of clay, sand, straw and water) around this dome to form your oven. Remember to leave a hole in the top for a chimney and an arched doorway to the front.
8. Leave cob to dry – this may take a few days, depending on the climate where you live.
9. Once the cob is dry enough to hold its shape well, remove the material from inside and clean it out.
10. Build your chimney by forming clay around a glass bottle and leaving it to dry, at which point you can easily remove the bottle.
11. Build a small fire within the chimney and keep it going steadily for 6-8 hours to bake the cob and harden the structure.

Using Your Pizza Oven

1. Build a fire central to the oven. One the logs/wood have burned down and the oven is hot, gently and carefully push the fire to one side, so the fire flicks round the top of the dome.
2. Make a pizza using some of your delicious home-grown produce.
3. Flour a pizza paddle (or flat bladed spade).
4. Place the pizza on the paddle and gently place it in the oven.
5. After around a minute, ease the paddle back under the pizza, bring it out and turn it round.
6. Return to the oven to cook the other side a little more.
7. Remove your pizza from the oven and enjoy!