During my time on this planet, I have picked up a number of things:

• The Earth is probably not flat
• It is likely that man once landed on the moon
• 2+2 is mostly 4
• Pizza is the best food

While the first few items are debatable, the 4th item is a well established scientific fact.

 

 

I typically prefer the simplicity of getting pizza from a local purveyor, but I also like to tinker with making it at home. Knowing that that dedicated pizza ovens at restaurants go to 700+ degrees Fahrenheit , I’ve toyed with the idea of modifying the controls of my kitchen oven to get to those levels. While I have used a thermocouple to measure the oven temperature during a cleaning cycle at well over 900 degrees F, the insurance companies and sensibility frown at such behavior. I decided to take it outside.

I once got distracted while my propane grill was heating up, and I left it on high for a bit too long. When I got back, I noticed a burning smell and that the temperature gauge was maxed out. This made me curious about two things:

• How hot did it get
• How hot could it get

I couldn’t figure out the former, but I could definitely figure out the latter. I made an enclosure with some bricks and got it to about 1050 F. It took a small optimized (open on the bottom) enclosure to get to that temperature, but I figured a pizza sized enclosure could get to an ambient temperature of at least 700 F.

I initially attempted using a piece of granite (a drop from a countertop manufacturer) set on bricks as the top of the oven and another rectangular granite drop as the cooking surface. I really thought that the granite would crack and all would be for naught. It  did not crack, but as a cooking surface it acted too much as an insulator. The heat went around it rather than heating the cooking surface.

For my next attempt I bought a round pizza stone from Wal-Mart for about 8 bucks, cut it to fit with an abrasive masonry blade, and tried it out.  I don’t know if it was the round geometry letting more heat by or if it was the thermal conductivity of the pizza stone, but it worked great.

 

Shown above is the last iteration. It has bricks supporting the granite drop for the top of the oven and the pizza stone as the cooking surface. It maintains about 750 – 850 F and will evenly cook a pizzas in about 4-5 minutes after heating up for about 20 minutes.

I still want to make a wood-fired pizza oven sometime in the future, but I don’t know when that will happen. The design is still being over thought and over engineered.