Do you have a wood fired pizza oven in your garden? If so, do you use it much?

[chicaguapa]

I've always wanted a wood fired pizza oven in my garden and we're buying a house which has the perfect place for one. So we're now seriously thinking about it.

I'm not sure I'll be put off tbh , but I was wondering if anyone has had one installed and if they used it as much as they thought they would?

We'd be buying one, not building our own.

Thanks.

[AnnoyingOrange]

How much pizza do you eat?

[burnishedsilver]

A friend has one and never uses it. She said it takes so long to get to the right temperature that you don't feel like pizza any more by the time it's ready.

[Fcukfifa]

I know someone who has a brick oven thing in his garden, but they use it for all sorts. They cook joints of beef for 24 hours for their Sunday dinner and it looks lovely

[puffylovett]

I know someone who has one, and judging by the amount of piccies popping up on Facebook, it gets used loads. Even in winter! It's in an accessible spot with an outdoor fire and preparation area though.

[chicaguapa]

We do eat pizza a fair bit and enjoy a properly cooked one. I have a peel and a couple of pizza stones, but the gas oven just doesn't get hot enough to cook it how we want it. The closest we've got is putting the stone on a BBQ but it doesn't cook them quickly.

I envisage having proper pizza once a fortnight but also using it to cook roasts once a month maybe. There's a built in BBQ in the garden at the moment and we'd replace that with the wood-fired oven. We never BBQ as we're not big meat eaters.

The one I'm looking at reaches 425 degrees in 20 minutes, though reviews say it's 20-30 minutes. I agree that if it were longer, like 2 hours which some of them are and if you build it yourself, we'd never use it. But 20-30 minutes seems reasonable.

[chicaguapa]

Looks like the latter replies are more promising than the first ones.

[IAmAPaleontologist]

We built a clay one ourselves and have had lots of fun with it over the summers. It has a few flaws but it needs rebuilding this summer so we are hopefully going to learn from our mistakes first time round and improve on it :)

[chicaguapa]

Looks great!

I researched building one but then you have to wait a couple of hours for it to reach temperature and that's too long for me. I found one that only takes 20-30 minutes, though the rub is that it costs £700.

Good to hear you've used it a lot over the summer. Will you be using it in the winter? We're already planning on using ours for Christmas dinner next year.

[Mrsbaconandbeans]

Love ours and have finally perfected the perfect pizza . Have tried to roast a leg of lamb and set fire to it still experimenting with other recipes but it's lovely cooking and eating outside.

[chicaguapa]

Now I'm really excited!

[IAmAPaleontologist]

No not going as far as Christmas dinner! True that they take a while to heat up but we've found cheating and using heat logs gets it going well.
The rebuild plan is to build a brick bbq next to it and have a bit of an outdoor kitchen going on, not sure we will get the pizza oven to meat roasting standard but bbq plus flatbreads etc sounds good to me.

[BeCool]

Friends of mine have an outdoor BBQ/fire pit that has a pizza oven insert.
The fire can be wood/coal or gas powered.

[FunkyBoldRibena]

I have a sideline in building these in schools.

However it really doesn't take two hours to heat up - I found if it is too hot then the pizza burns.

I wait until my cooking group arrive on site [we have one at our community gardens], then fire it up whilst they make the dough. Once they have rolled it, and dressed it, the oven is ready. An hour max. But - and it's a big but - they do need alot of wood. Luckily we have alot of dry seasoned wood.

We fired it up weekly during the summer, and twice weekly some weeks. I am firing it up on the 17th Dec for a midwinter festival [of pizza].

[BeCool]

like this: www.garden4less.co.uk/buschbeck-pizza-oven-insert.asp

We made some very tasty pizzas in it

[FunkyBoldRibena]

This is ours. I can get three full size pizzas in it at one time.

[Blueskies80]

Looks great- how do you build a pizza oven, any useful advice or websites to look at? Would love to do this assuming they work as well as a bought one (we couldn't afford one like that). Also any advice re sighting of pizza oven, eg we will be building decking so I'm assuming it would need to be a decent distance from decking?

[IAmAPaleontologist]

funky that looks amazing? Any advice?

[IAmAPaleontologist]

oops pressed post. Blue we just googled and followed instructions from various blogs.