kkrace wrote:
How often is the pizza oven getting used? I'm helping the guy behind me with one. Right now we just stacked bricks on top of the fire brick slab he made and put a metal roof on it from scrap. We have used it a couple times now. First was a disaster since neither of us researched what was involved with heating one up. Didn't realize it was a 2 hour process that involved moving the fire around in the oven.
Through the winter we didn't use it and are currently out of wood....but planning to order some and fire it up. In the non-covid warm months we use it at least every 2 weeks....for sure anytime we have people over because it just cooks everything so nice.
Hat up takes a while but I don't move the fire around. I build a pretty big fire right in the middle, light it with a 100k btu propane weed burner, and keep adding wood for 45 minutes to an hour. By them there are a lot of coals but still a raging fire, I push all that to the back, maybe spread it to cover 90-120 degrees of the back wall, throw a couple more hunks of wood in and let it go about 10-15 minutes so the center cools down and the top of the done is "burned white" which means any and all soot has burned off which means the done is at least 800F, there is a pic a couple posts down. Floor temp of 550-750 seems to work pretty well for pizza, any hotter and you blacken the bottom, I bought a laser thing but you can also tell by throwing in some semolina flour and watching it....if it turns black when it hits the floor the floor is still too hot and you need a wait a bit more or plan to drop the pizza closer to the door. For sure it takes practice.....I have a habit of flipping the topping into the fire