Cooking Dreams (TM)

Wood Burning Brick Pizza Oven

One featured topic covered in this site is the construction and use (cooking, low smoke fires, recipes, ...) of a wood burning brick pizza oven. Wood burning brick pizza ovens are often incorporated in outdoor kitchens as well as built as standalone structures in your backyard or garden area.

The wood burning brick oven section content ranges from extensive construction pictures, cooking pizza and other foods, material sources for building, recipes, information on how to build low smoke fires, and perhaps most valuable to people wanting to build, a list of links to the great web sites used to help construct and cook this wood burning brick pizza and bread oven. The site also has pictures and contributions from people who have used this site to build their own ovens including a cool video showing the time lapse construction and use an oven set to some fun pizza music. Click on Oven Stories to see the video.

Outdoor Wood Burning Brick Pizza Oven

Many pictures covering the construction of an Outdoor Wood Burning Brick Pizza Oven are provided, with each phase of the construction documented with pictures and descriptions on separate web pages.

Construction of the base, consisting of site preparation, installation of re-bar, and side walls, and insulated refractory hearth (using lime- portland cement- concrete mixture)

Building the oven chamber including interior and exterior fire brick arches, and application of cladding for structural and thermal mass.

The outdoor wood burning brick pizza oven chimney and finishing are covered in additional pages.

Pages covering cooking and material sources are also provided.

Wood burning brick pizza oven. Dallas Tx. Built using plans purchased from www.traditionaloven.com, then modified to fit my vision. Rado Hand was a great help in bouncing ideas around changes to his base plans.

Oven chamber construction. Dome in place, front arch in place. Getting ready to cut and install transition bricks (left). Transition bricks (dome to front arch) in place.

One of the first fire in the new oven. Note there is a trick to firing to get to the required cooking temps. See Fires page

Cladding complete in this view Ready for chamber insulation (separate page), chimney. But it is a functional oven at this point

Thermometer is almost pegged. Fire in the back. Note I now normally place and maintain the fire on the right side after over is at temp

Base. See Base page for more details. i use this area for wood storage now. Finished with "render", basically a concrete sand mix. Also added piers on right side as soil is highly elastic clay in this area.

Sourdough Bread

During the Covid-19 pandemic I have started baking sourdough bread using my inside electric ovens. I quit counting but am estimating i have baked over 150 loaves during this past year, giving most to neighbors and friends. Good mental therapy task, baking break in the background while working virtually from home. I have started adding a Sourdough Bread section (see navigation at top of this page) on this sourdough bread making and baking subject area.

Mom's Cookin's (TM)

Click on Mom's Cookin's section link for Recipes, cooking techniques, pictures of Mom's Cookin's.