Pizza ovens. What do you use?

What do you use to get a pie on your plate?
When I catered years ago we had a portable gas oven. Now at home I use a camp chef pizza oven. And am pretty please with it. I can get it up to about 700 degrees and it produces a good pie. we go to Baja a couple times a year and there I get to use a beautiful brick Pizza oven to produces a beautiful pie. I have used everything from BBQs to of course the house oven.

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Mr naf wants the stone one in the up post, but forbidden. So he got a little upgrade for the existing Weber with an accessory, similar to this one below, and with a pizza stone. Pizza is pretty decent.

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very nice I didn’t know that Weber had that accessory but it shouldn’t surprise me since they’ve been around since I was a kid and I’m an old guy. the baja brick oven was built by an old fella who built a dome over the master bedroom in the house and the owner asked him if he could make a pizza oven and that’s what he got.

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Naf,

Very nice.

Impossible as we have very restrictive Barcelona City Laws regarding BBQs due to the danger of fires.

We live in urban Barcelona, a médium rise and even on our roof top terrace (private) the condominium board does not permit. Nor in the city at all.

Enjoy your pizza.

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It wasn’t make by Weber, but some company playing with a Weber grill. The temperature can go up to 400° - 450°C.

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(Image from website) but we have one of these Baker Stone pizza ovens that fits on top of a gas grill. We’ve really enjoyed it and had success with it (my brother also owns one, as does a friend in FL).

I’m not sure how hot it gets - the thermometer on top only has “cooking ranges” but from the cooking times I think it gets about as hot as my oven (550), maybe if I let it heat longer it would get hotter. . . who knows.

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In the country, DH put in this Italian kit oven. Came as cement dome in 4 pieces. You can tart up the finish as much as you want. Ours, as you can see, is very rustic.
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57%20PM

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I’ve wanted one of those for years - no “tarting” on my dream one either :wink:

Family friends made their own using this book - it works great and they had great fun making it. I think there was a long thread on Chowhound years ago about building your own . . .

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I’m in a townhouse, so gas/charcoal grills are forbidden completely, and electric grills must be 6 feet from the deck on the driveway. Don’t want to have to run up/downstairs to grill, so I use a grill pan on the stove top for meats (finish in a medium oven), and a pizza stone in my crappy electric oven heated to 500°, and it works out pretty well. I preheat for 30-60 minutes, and the dough gets rolled pretty thinly, so it crisps up pretty well.

Goat Cheese, prosciutto, and caramelized onion pizza was the last one I made. I usually buy the dough from Trader Joe’s or Wegmans.

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I would just like to add that a wood fired oven is fun…but a lot of work. Someone has to tend the fire for at least an hour before baking since in most settings the live fire can’t be left alone. For this reason, we use ours when DH is not actively involved in some other maintenance project, pruning, mowing, burning trimmings, repairs, etc. And from my point of view, pizza parties are a hoot…but require a lot of topping prep and dough rolling, the latter on a fairly tight schedule. Pizza for 2 or 4, not a big deal. 6 or 8? A pain. And if pizzas are custom made and not shared, everyone eats in shifts.

The optimum situation is if you can handle guests helping slice and chop, and if everyone rolls out and tops his own pizza. Prepare for chaos, but it;s a party after all.

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Agreed that a big pizza party is a lot of work.

Our friends with the home built oven do them all the time. Their “strategy” is that they make the dough and have the cheese but each guest brings a topping or two (prepped and ready to go). They then just make pizzas however they want and there is a big picnic table that when the pizzas are done, they are cut and left there - so people just hang around, grab a piece now and again, and it is a more casual party than a sit down dinner style party.

It’s a fun time, a good solution but still a ton of work for the two of them making and baking for the whole party (they don’t trust others to make and bake).

PS - their oven gets super hot, so pizzas take 1-2 minutes to bake. In my grill top oven they still take 5-6 minutes.

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re “create your own pizza”, many of our guests have “made their own calzone”, as they overload the pie and it tumbles over itself when sliding off the peel. We warn them, but it’s so hard to stop piling on tempting things…

Linda nice pizza!
Thimes I have had that book for years and have made two earth ovens from it. And as far as I know they are still working. Wood fired ovens do take a long time to get up to Temp the one in Baja takes about 2 hours. I started a Wood fired oven after I finished building my home and realized about halfway through since we really don’t get any visitors and there’s just two of us I need to put my efforts into more urgent and important things.
There really isn’t anything as tasty as a woodfired Pizza out of a really hot oven though. I still do small Pizza catering jobs from time to time with one or two of the camp chef pizza ovens I do all my prep work the night before and my assistant is my food processor to shred and slice. I make small aluminum envelopes with wood pellets and throw them in to give a little bit of the smoke flavor.I really don’t care for Jarred pesto but Costco has a pretty decent basil pesto in the cooler section and that has become a favorite with everyone. Still the all-time favorite with everyone is the Dungeness crab alfredo sauce and smoked gouda with green onions. I believe no matter what you cooked your pizza in if you pull it out and slice it up and take your first bite and are happy then that’s a perfect Pizza!

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So true and exactly why they insist on making and baking the pizzas - but they do allow “topping requests” from guests so everyone can have what they want if they are picky.

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For us it’s our regular (but convection ovens) the big stove is dual fuel, and we can get them both really hot. We typically use a stone, but sometimes not. We also put them on the grill outside & enjoy great pizza. We had a summer party for eight, and the small pizzas were served as appetizers while we were still enjoying our quaffs outside. We then segued to the dining room for the rest of the vegetarian meal. Mushroom Moussaka was the main. It was a fun time and totally manageable. Would have been a totally different picture if everyone was customizing their own pizzas.

How many pizzas can your oven make at the same time?

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Good question. The specs say something like 6, but in truth 3 max for us, and usually no more than two at a time in order to control bake. Also, one needs to define pizza by size. Many oven makers suggest small pizzas, 8"-9". Ours are usually around 10"-12 ".

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By looking at the photo, we were debating among ourselves, husband said 4, I said 2, lol.

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Remember that pizza is usually baked with the live fire at the rear of the oven, so figure at least 25% of your floor will by unavailable. Now bread is usually baked after the fire has been removed from the oven, so the entire floor is usable.

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That is a beautiful oven pilgrim. wood-fired ovens usually have the wood for the fire in the back and you also have to have wiggle room in there if you have more than one pie so you can turn them. You can’t just stick them in there and leave them till they’re done I’m sure Pilgrim can confirm that. A tool I find very useful with pizza ovens is a infrared thermometer pistol. Really let you know what’s going on with your oven temp wise.

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