I was pondering a pizza oven for over a year now and now that the second lockdown in germany kicks in, I impulsively started working on one. Since I’m not a mason and since I definitely won’t start practising masonry with the most complicated structure – a dome – I decided to go for a metal drum instead of bricks.

Nonetheless, some aspects had to be considered: I want it to burn wood, not gas, it needs sufficient (not overall perfect) insulation and generally I want to get as close to “stone oven pizza” as possible. So the idea was the following:

The barrel has two horizontal zones divided by a pizza stone in the middle, with the lower one being the fire chamber and the upper one being the actual cooking chamber. The heat is drafted from the back to the front, heating the whole cooking chamber including the pizza stone, so imitating a “real” pizza oven. The fire chamber has a bottom made of firebrick (for durability) and the rest of the inside walls is insulated with cut to size, bolted-on vermiculite tiles. A long enough chimney will hopefully provide enough draft to create sufficient heat.

It looks like shit at the moment, but apart from the seemingly inevitable holes I wreaked when welding, things went pretty well until now.

The next (hopefully soon) post when it’s completed will provide a materials list.

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