Rants & Opinions

Quick post on wintering your wood burning pizza oven. I didn’t want the oven exposed to the elements through the winter (good idea with all the snow and ice this year). I bought a generic Home Depot BBQ cover and cut a slit in the side of it. The largest one fits perfectly around the oven as you can see.

Also of note, you can see my chimney pipe which I added towards the end of the season to avoid heat and smoke damage to my BBQ overhang. I recommend that you take down the top part of the pipe and the chimney cap. Seems like a pain in the ass – yes. But, with the wind, snow and ice it is just to much trouble to leave it up there in my opinion. If you are enclosing the whole unit, this obviously isn’t an issue – but if you are leaving it exposed I think the caution is warranted. I had the foresight to secure the pipe with bolts – so removing at the end of the season and putting back up in spring is no big deal.

Finally got to utilizing our pizza oven. Lets just say that it isn’t as easy as the youtube videos make it look. Get your fire going. Let it run for a good two hours before you cook anything. I think that is the key. The one thing I found tricky was I naturally wanted to close the door to maintain heat. That actually stifles the fire and often works against you when you are trying to get the fire going.

Another trick, don’t make the mistake of starting your fire in the back or corner of the oven. Yes, this is the eventual destination of the wood and burning embers – but you need to start right smack dab in the middle. When you have the oven to temp and your wood is that nice white – time to push it to the back and start your cooking.

One thing I noticed with the oven, the brick around the front cracked a bit under the heat. Eugene from Grills N Ovens warned me about this. When the oven cools, you can still see the issue, but it is less visible. I bought some masonry cement but haven’t ventured into the repair yet. You’ll also notice the front part of the unit blackens. For me, I like it – gives it the authentic look. The wife, who wants it all to look like something from a catalog…not so much. Just be aware – it’s not always going to be pretty and if you want to keep some of the prettiness, clean it up once cooled.

This summer I purchased a wood fired oven. After doing a bunch of research on the subject I ended up buying one from Eugene at Grills N Ovens. You can spend a LOT of money on these things depending on the make and model you choose. On average you are looking anywhere between 1k and 6k. For me, I saw myself utilizing this thing maybe once or twice every couple of weeks. It’s one part cooking novelty and one part outdoor decoration. Having looked around in various BBQ stores, I was pretty certain i didn’t want one of those metal monstrosities and I felt the difference in ‘cooking experience’ was marginal from that of your indoor oven. As such, I went with one of the solid ones from Grills N Ovens.

The unit arrived on a pallet. I was warned that it was not ‘like the ones at the BBQ store’ – i.e. a few sheets of welded metal and a couple hundred points. In fact, the unit was about one and a half tons. Moving this into place was not going to be easy. While the unit is delivered with a specialty pallet lift, there wasn’t much of an opportunity to get that up steps and down a narrow path to it’s final resting place in my backyard. Eugene suggested renting a 2 ton engine hoist to move the unit. Sounded easy enough. He even had some pictures. Well, it wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination.

The first challenge was finding the hoist. Most Rent-Alls don’t stock these things – because they are not a common rental item that is going to make them money and if someone needs it, they need it for a while and are more likely to buy it. I ended up finding one on Kijiji and borrowing a truck to move it. Next step, you can just lift this thing straight away, you need straps to attach from the hoist to the oven (they smartly build in metal clamps you can attach to). I bought some standard straps from Home Depot (the kind you would utilize to secure a load in your truck) for about $25. Take your time lifting the thing. Seriously. It is a delicate balancing act. You might also want to pick your hoist wisely. Rubber wheels are a better choice vs. metal. I had metal and it was one hell of a time moving this thing on the cobblestones to the back of our place. Another tip, you’re gonna need some thicker sheets of plywood. I utilized this to get up stairs and to line the edge of our path which was about 3 inches too short to accommodate the full width of the hoist. To get it up steps, we had to utilize a winch hooked up to a tree. From there, you just move inch by inch, moving the plywood, adjusting – pushing. We did it with two people, but you could easily utilize a third.

Finally, once you get to your final location, I hope for your sake that your width can accommodate or you have a space in the middle of the area you are placing the oven. Our design had a space in the middle where we planned on storing wood. Even still it was difficult. Final placement involved swinging the oven like a bit of a pendulum and easing off on the hoist for it to drop in the approximate location we wanted it.

You’ll note some good and bad things about our placement in the picture below. The good is the design approach we took on the stand. This was built utilizing BestWay Stone product. Classico Antico…or something like that. On the top we had (what I think) was a bright idea to pick up the look of the pillars with long slate stone that stretches across the top horizontally. Realistically we could have rested the oven right on top of the stones – but aesthetically this looked nicer and adds an extra bit of stability. It also removes the need to use a layer of metal and place the stone on top of that. I think the only negative with our placement was the relative proximity to our BBQ overhang. The oven stays remarkably cool, so it isn’t so much a heat issue as it is a smoke issue. Perfect world I wouldn’t have run a pipe from the top of the vent, but because of the close proximity, I have been forced to extend the vent to above the BBQ overhang (which you can see in some of the pics I will post later.

Anyways, this was a fun challenge – and after some light usage, we are pretty happy with the oven.