re: Outdoor Wood Fire Oven

If you're hardcore chasing 90 sec VPN, then check out the pizzamaking.com forum. It looks dated, but it is chock full of fantastic info, excellent pizza makers, and some very serious oven geeks.

Forgot to mention: make sure you look at prevailing winds/airflow around your oven site. Nothing like thinking you've got the perfect spot, but the dominant airflow runs all the smoke back toward your house/under patio cover. A low-roofed patio isn't a problem if you run a chimney pipe from the oven out to the side & above the patio roofline. Definitely check local building/fire codes & see if you are required to have a spark arrestor chimney cap and/or locate the oven a specific distance from house/structure.

I planned and plotted for years. Built one from scratch, then realized that it was a giagantic pain in the arse. I now make pizza (all the time) on a baking steel in my home oven (which has a wonderful broiler).

I turn on the oven, it gets to 500 in about an hour...and I've figured out that I preheat the baking steel with the broiler for about 10 mins while i prep the pizza, the stone gets to 700 degrees easily. Slip in the pizza, turn off the broiler, cook for a few minutes, then switch the broiler back on for top browning. Using that slightly fiddly but not too complex method, I can turn out a pretty closed to wood fired pie. Leopard spots on bottom, as much or as little char as I want on top. It's far easier than managing a fire, and it keeps me out of the heat and mosquitos while I'm cooking.

I still love the things, but I'm convinced that our climate is not conducive to WFO use for too much of the year. I still need to convert my concrete block oven base into an outdoor firepit.....maybe when the weather cools off, I'll get it done.