Outdoor cooking - Barbecues, Barbecue, BBQs, BBQ, Smokers, Grills. And Ribs.

I built a pizza oven last year.

I have never built anything in my life, barely put up a shelf. But I'm pretty handy with bikes, and making unintelligible leaps, so I got stuck in. Here are a few details on the build:

What started as this:

Ended up as this hole once I'd decided to do some digging after an all-nighter. A couple bottles of excellent Breton cider proved adequate fuel for such an endeavour.

The hole was filled with a load of gravel and then 6 inches of reinforced concrete after a surveyor friend said I might as well chuck some rebar in there as the final thing was going to weigh well over a shit load.

Once that was all set a friend who had laid a brick or two in the previous millennium gave me a hand to do some block work. Breton cider (it really is excellent) fuelled us once more, to the detriment of the block work unfortunately. What it lacked in straight it had strength though.

A bit of form work later...

... I had a concrete slab to work on.

Then I put a 25mm vermiculite board down, and then a few fire bricks salvaged from storage heaters. Then I started to make my mould for the oven. For this I used an old maple syrup drum (it smelled delicious when I was angle grinding the shit out of it). I cut it slightly more than in half along its length as I wanted more height than half the drum would give me. After some advice from an oven builder I intended to make the mould removable once the first fire clay layer was set. So I replaced the ends of the drum with some old worktop (this whole process was made much easier by having some brickies build a kitchen extension for me at the same time, so an abundance of tools, advice, waste materials and piss taking).

The idea was that once the fire clay was set I could reach in the oven, smash out the front piece of worktop, remove it and then remove the rear one by fixing a rope to the old drawer handle I screwed into it and giving it a good yank. Then, the two 'rib' pieces of drum would simply fall away and I could remove them. As it happened, the two rib bits are stuck fast and will live the rest of their days periodically rusting and then being roasted to 500 degrees centigrade plus. The worktop bits came out easily enough though.

I then made a cardboard form for the oven mouth (at the calculated height, for those in the know) and set the chimney base into that. A layer of chicken wire followed in the hope that a bit of extra integrity for the fire clay wouldn't hurt. Once that was all finished I surrounded everything with breeze blocks to make it easier to pile clods of wet clay on top of each other without it all falling off. Then I was ready to put the clay layer down.

The clay was an absolute cunt to deal with. I had borrowed a cement mixer from a neighbour because by this point the builders had finished and taken their mixer, the pricks. The borrowed mixer was woefully underpowered and I ended up doing half the mixing by hand. I have weak, idle, soft hands, and the clay was heavy and unwilling to mix freely, much like a UKIP voter. The lime added to the mix was also brutal, and got through a little hole in my gloves (both pairs, I doubled up) and burned a weird dent out of my finger that has left a glossy scar.

The advice from the oven builder was that the clay stage is crucial to do quickly, with no voids in the clay. So when I started to run out of cement about 80% of the way through it resulted in my screaming to my wife that she had to go to the builders' merchants ASA fucking P. I was tired and the cider had long run out...

It turned out ok in the end. A couple little voids here and there and some cracks. The latter wasn't a cause for concern apparently and the former were filled with fire cement.

Then it was time for some insulation, in this case a ceramic blanket from Victas, my local wood fire oven professionals.

After that came more insulation in the form of a 5 inch thick layer of perlite concrete which was light and willing to mix. This stage was comically easy compared to the fire clay. Much cider and merriment that day, I can tell you.

The next stage was rendering it. I've never rendered anything, apart from myself useless. I'd got this far though...

A mate's mate is a plasterer so I gave him a call about 5 panicked minutes into rendering it. 'Don't worry mate, it always looks shit when it's going on but it'll all come together in the end and look good', he assured me. And he was right about the looking shit bit, but sadly incorrect about the coming good bit. It was rendered though, so I moved on...

The next stages involved painting it and making some cladding out of old palettes. But I forgot to take pics as I was on a cloud of accomplishment and sourdough pizza. So the next pics are of its current state:

If you're wondering what the slit is in the bottom of the shot above, it's a bottle opener. I moulded a steel angle into the slab in the hope that it would work and it does!

So, the whole thing isn't quite finished. I'd like to sort out its ugly waist, possibly with some mosaic tiling. I'm also not set on the Greek chapel style white, so the whole thing might get mosaic'd. The local cats have taken to jumping on it with muddy paws. One of the little fuckbags even took a shit on top of it. Cat pizza anyone?

Does it fucking work though? I hear you cry. Yes. Yes it does. My laser thermometer tops out at 500 degrees, which happens when pointing away from the fire at peripheral areas of the oven when it's roaring, so god knows that the highest temperatures are getting to in there. At 400 degrees it cooks a pizza in less than two minutes.

I even risked a massive 5-rib chunk of beef in there on Christmas day and it worked a charm! A remote control meat probe minimised the risk and gave us a perfectly cooked dinner. Excuse the pic and the manky bit of turkey some other cunt cooked, two bottles of rouge happened during the cooking and fucks went right out of the window...

The oven has also done a splendid job of cooking chickens, roasted veg, bread and various bits of pig. As Grace Jones didn't quite say, 'it ain't perfect but it's perfect for me'. I'm using it regularly, at least once a fortnight over winter and weekly when it's warmer. I'm looking forward to doing some over night stuff and lots of fucking pizza in 2019!