Pizza eater

Thanks Thomas - in all honesty I’ve got to say I’ve never seen a decent pizza cooked in one! But there might be a couple of reasons for that. First, I’ve noticed a peculiar inverse law where the better people seem to be at building nice looking pizza ovens, the worse they are at making a pizza. It’s true, I’ve seen immaculately crafted pizza ovens used to cook a dough which I can’t even call pizza dough, it was just not kneaded, balled or risen right, wouldn’t stretch and predictably produced something more like chapatti than pizza. Probably people get too carried away with having finished their oven they put together a demo video before they even learned how to make a pizza or get good results with it, and I can’t fault them for that. But there’s another reason, and I think a lot of the diy pizza oven builders are all copying each other’s designs and missing a trick. They’re all making hemispherical ovens which are too tall. The apex of the roof is so high the heat of the fire isn’t channelled low enough over the cooking space. If you contrast their design with the commercial example, the commercial one has the same hemisphere or igloo shape, but the floor is much higher. The angle of incidence at the edges between the floor and roof will be much smaller, directing the flame across the roof and lower across the pizza. The other thing is the entrance tunnel is relatively wider and arranged so the cooking stone area is rectangular all the way to the back, not a thin entrance tunnel opening out into a hemispherical chamber inside. Finally the lack of a flue on the commercial one. The air supply and exhaust is via the entrance tunnel. So in summary, I want to take the construction techniques from the DIY pizza ovens all over YouTube and design inspiration from the delivita oven and other commercial products like ooni and roccbox, all of which keep the oven roof kinda low, and hopefully make something which works ok and has a nice smooth stone floor, sized at least 20 inches wide. And I do take your point, I might end up with something which doesn’t work well, but I will have learned along the way and will know how to fix it “next time”! Thanks, that is an important point about the heat of the fire being higher than the 1000F I’m targeting as an oven temp. Probably I do need to abandon my plan to cast a stone floor and go back to fire bricks or kiln tiles, as others are using in their home built pizza ovens. The floor of the oven should have a characteristic that accumulates and retains heat, not too thermally insulating, so I will have to check some specs and figure out what might be the best material. Long term maintenance and replacement is a good point too. I’ll try to consider that. the oven entrance and roof should be high enough to accommodate a rustic loaf. I’ll be going with a somewhat raised floor, but not crazy high, and the domed shape means there will be height available in the middle. Thanks for your comments (and to all others too).

Thanks guys, it seems it’s likely more complicated than I had assumed. I’ll find a good diy pizza oven building forum and research it further. There are a few videos on YouTube, but they all seem to use kiln brick floors and presumably trap all kinds of dirt and ash in the gaps. But spalling is not going to be desirable, so maybe I do need to find some suitably sized tiles. I appreciate your advice! Thanks - the main body of the oven would be a 4:1 ratio of vermiculite to cement, plus 1.5 to 2 parts water as needed to form a paste. This seems pretty widely used amongst diy pizza oven builds from what I could gather on youtube, so hopefully no exploding.

Hi, All I have been able to discover about the product I’m inspired to copy - I mean pay homage to - is that it uses “refractory stone” for its floor. That is basically pizza stone, same as the pizza stone you might put in your home oven to cook a pizza on. So I am hoping to stumble upon a simple formula to let me mix a cement which will set into more or less the same stuff. Here is a link to the product I would like to replicate, albeit at less than the $2,000 they charge for this one. Remove commercial link per TOS I am thinking a Pilates gym ball mould. A couple of layers of vermiculite/cement concrete to form the dome and entrance way, and then I will need to cast a suitable floor which is the bit which has me puzzled. I searched extensively, but finding a large enough pre-made pizza stone with the correct dimensions will be impossible.

Hi all I hope you don’t mind helping me gain some knowledge on how to approach a problem which arises as part of a home build pizza oven project? I want to cast a flat, smooth, single piece floor for my oven, and it should be able to withstand pizza oven temps (up to around 600C /1100F). I want to avoid the use of firebricks, or anything which isn’t perfectly smooth and free from gaps, so would want to understand how to create a mortar or cement mix which I could cast into a mould sized around 20 inches x 23 inches and a couple of inches thick (unless it should be thicker?). This floor would sit on a vermiculite/cement mix plinth for added heat insulation. Since it will be the floor of an oven, with food in contact with it, it should not shed sand or dust when scraped by a pizza peel. Ideally I want something which, when set, looks like and has the properties of a pizza stone. I’ve heard that it might be as simple as mixing bentonite kitty litter, water and sand in the right ratios, but then other sources online recommend dry lime, cement, all sorts of variations, so I was hoping to tap into some of your experience and see if there’s a simple solution which will work well? Thank you for any replies!