Category Archives: Clay Oven

Burnt offerings

We produce our first pizza…

After many years on the back burner (no pun intended) our clay/pizza oven is finally operational. Hoorah!

Earlier this month, with great trepidation, we scraped out the sand from the centre, keeping our fingers crossed that the whole thing wouldn’t collapse.

It didn’t and we fired it up.

We were so impatient that we failed to let it heat up long enough before we slid in our first pizza.  It took an age to cook and then the base wasn’t crisp but very doughy.

We learned two things – we needed to allow more time for it to reach optimum cooking temperature, and the pizza base should be thinner.

On the second firing, we lit it at 9am and put the first pizza in at 12 noon.  It was done in minutes, the edges charcoaled and the pizza stone cracked in half!  Not quite what we had in mind.

Number 3, we let it heat up for 2 hours, then pushed the embers aside and kept them alight by feeding in small sticks.  We also used a pizza crisper tray rather than a stone.  This time the base was perfect but we took our eye off the top for a few mintues too long and still ended up with a charcoal rim!

It’s obviously a work in progress and we will continue to strive for the perfect pizza.

Now the oven is finished, our next project is a bench for the garden so that we can sit comfortably and enjoy that “perfect pizza”!

The clay oven

It’s been a long time coming…

Way back in 2011, after attending a clay oven workshop and filled with enthusiasm, we embarked on our own clay oven building project in the garden.

We constructed the base and then left it to dry.  In fact we left it for several years!!!  It has been a bit of an eyesore in the garden ever since, covered in plastic weighted down with bags of clay that we dug from the ground.

Since the weather had been so good, we decided to finally finish the job and set about building the oven itself.  Inside the bags, the clay had grown a covering of moss but was surprisingly still usable when mixed with water to become pliable.  We made a dome of sand in the centre of the base, spread newspaper over the top, then set about covering it in the wet clay.  It was a case of slapping it on with our hands.  The second layer applied a week later was a mixture of clay mixed with sawdust and straw to insulate, and then finally the following weekend we put on the top layer (just clay), which was a bit wetter and threatened to slide off!

So, do we now have our clay oven?  Not quite.  It has to dry inside and out and we are nervous about raking out the sand, in case the whole thing collapses.

It will be a while yet before we cook our first pizza in there, but hopefully we’re talking weeks not years!