Pizza in a Bread Oven

[CanuckJim]

I live in a cold climate. In winter, the wind is steady and sometimes very strong and gusty from the northwest. Therefore, my oven door faces south. In addition to preventing cooling the oven and blowing ash around, you want to reduce the amount of cold air entering the chamber while you're firing. Winter air will be as cold as it is, of course, but gusts of it will dramatically increase your firing times and the burn itself.

Jim

[mnlewis]

You really confused me, where in the world did you find black walnut, I thought the blight from the early 1900s took care of all of the black walnut until recently when the found a few still growing in GA.

[redbricknick]

O.K. My oven isn't going as fast as I planned, but there are reasons. I'm not a fan of cinder blocks. I like my walls built of stone, and I'm picky about my stone, so amassing materials has been the main drawback thus far.( I live in Los Angeles) BUT! I recently found a riverbed near Pasadena with enough stone to build a thousand hearth stands, and have been there enough times to build one, so It's time for the serious masonry to begin. I'm building a stone arch for the wood storage opening (my first) and have carefully selected only the finest of river stone voussoirs for it's construction. The walls will be all stone, with a cinderblock inner wall for the suspended slab to rest upon. My real question is about the oven floor. I went to visit the earthstone oven factory, and spoke at length with the owner Maurice, who has generously offered to donate his firebrick offcuts for us to mosaic together a floor for our oven. His tiles are about half as thick as regular firebricks, though he tells us they will suffice for an oven floor. I feel that this forum is at the cutting edge of brick oven design, and I definitely want to utilise all the latest advancements in brick oven tech in our oven. He scoffed at the idea of the flipped hearth... He has enough offcuts to make a double thick firebrick floor, but is that necessary? The whole theme of our oven is to use recycled or found materials, so his floor seems perfect, but I wanted to run it by you guys first.

[james]

MNL,
Nice catch. We have a local company that makes decorative gun stocks -- I think they bring in their wood from the southeast. There is a mountain of cuttings, and every few weekends, the let you come in a fill up a pickup truck for a small fee. The wood is beautiful. I won't swear by its exact provinence, but it's perfect for me, and the wood burns very nicely. It is heavy, puts out a good flame for the dome, and a solid base of coals to drive heat across the hearth.

James

[james]

Nick,

If you use the thinner tile, there isn't enough mass for pizza or baking, so you need to add something below -- such as the Island hearth, where you add a layer of thermal material (concrete, refractory concrete, or firebrick) below the cooking floor, but surrounded by insulating concrete below and on the sides. In general, a firebrick on its flat side gives you the mass you need. That's why it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a thin baker's tile on top of ordinary concrete for thermal mass. You end up with a thin layer of a higher performance material on top of a thicker layer of poor performance material (ordinary concrete).

Can you find any used fire bricks from a fireplace or furnace?

James

[redbricknick]

Our plan was to pour our hearth with 4 inches of reinforced concrete for strength, then a perlite/portland blend layer of five inches on top of that, then the 2 inch tiles from Maurice on top of that... We could get enough offcuts to make the tiles double thick.. Think that'd be enough? His hearths are 3 inches of perlite/portland/sand on the bottom, three inches of regular cement on top of that, then the 2 inch firebrick tiles. He says that works, but I don't want my oven to just work, I want it so sing. Found materials only go so far. If it takes money to get the correct materials, we'll spend money to do it right, we're just trying our best to do this thing as earth friendly as possible, whilst building a cutting edge pizza oven.