Here I've posted many of the questions asked by visitors to this page, and my attempts at answering them. I'll add to this section as more questions come in. If you have a question not answered here or elsewhere on the page, please post a message via the guestbook.html form that follows this FAQ.

Can you post the plans you used?
Can you email me the plans you used?
How and where can I get directions for building?

I built my oven using plans I derived from two books: Alan Scott's The Bread Builders and Tom Jaine's Building a Wood-Fired Oven For Bread & Pizza. These are copyrighted, in-print books, so it wouldn't be right to post copies of the actual plans. I do intend to post more detailed construction pictures, though, to help illustrate the vaguer parts of the plans, and also to show what I did differently..

The bottom line is: buy a copy of The Bread Builders, and/or visit the Ovencrafters web site and buy a set of plans there. The book and plans are well worth it so don't hesitate to get them.

What are the dimensions of the oven opening (door)?

It's 14 inches wide, and about 10 inches high. The picture just above shows how the doorway was formed before the entry and chimney were added.

How do you heat the oven?

A fire is built inside the oven, right on the bricks. I start a small fire with newspaper and kindling and add slowly add larger pieces until the oven is about half filled with firewood.The smoke comes out the door and goes up the chimney. Once things get going the fire would burn too fast if left to its own devices, so I block most of the doorway with a row of bricks, to control the draft. The fire calms down and the load of wood burns for an hour or two. I add more as necessary to keep it going nicely.

Over a period of time (2 hours for pizza, longer for bread), the brickwork and the concrete cladding around it absorb heat. Then, for pizza the fire is pushed all the way to the back of the oven, and for bread the coals and ashes are raked out. The floor of the oven is cleaned of ashes by swabbing with a slightly damp rag stuck to the end of a stick. During baking, heat flows back from the bricks into the oven keeping it hot for many hours. The doorway of the oven can be closed off with a wood and metal panel to hold in heat and moisture while baking bread and meat -- see the sketch farther down the page. The doorway is left open for pizzas to let the smoke and steam out.

What is the size (footprint and height) of your oven?

Outside dimensions of the foundation slab are 52" wide and about 60" deep. The oven is about 4 1/2' high at the sides and 6' high at the center, with the chimney cap about 9' or 10' off the ground. Inside, the oven is about 24" wide and 30" deep give or take (I don't have the measurements on hand right now).

How much can you cook in it at once (and is the fire at the back)?

I can cook two pizzas at once with the fire at the back.With the fire raked out, I've cooked a roast, a pie and a pan of root vegetables all together. I could probably fit in 9 loaves of bread.

What kind of foods are cooked in the brick oven?

Bread, pizza, meats, vegetables, pies, beans: anything you can roast in a regular oven. The advantage of a brick oven is its ability to give you very high heat (like 750ºF) without worrying about smoke or spattering. Spatters just burn off next time you fire the oven! As the oven cools, you can bake bread, pastries and beans, and if you want, even make some yogurt with the last remnants of heat. 

How hot does the exterior of the oven get?

Most of the outside stays cool. The warmest point is the face of the chimney above the oven door, which gets very warm but not too hot to touch. The very top of the metal roof gets warm after a few hours, but just warm. Maybe 100°F?

What kind of wood do you burn?

I've been burning scrap lumber, pine or fir 2x4 or 4x4's cut to to fit in the oven the long way. Hardwoods would be better. I'll get oak when I run out of scrap.

 

Is it necessary to use fire bricks in the oven or can you use common bricks?

Following Alan Scott's directions, I used firebrick for the hearth (floor) of the oven and common red bricks for the rest. You can use firebrick throughout if you wish. This is optional for home ovens, probably necessary for commercial or frequently-used ovens.

 

Did you use any type of special mortar?

In the oven and chimney, yes, I used a mixture of fireclay, portland cement and sand in the volume proportions recommended in The Bread Builders. This is heat-resistant enough for occasional-use ovens. For a commercial or daily-fired oven he recommends using alumina-based refractory mortars. These are expensive and tricky. I used plain mason's mix for the cement block base.

Is this project beyond a mere female?

No! Anyone with patience, plans and a good book on masonry from the library should be able to manage it. The only time it involves heavy lifting is when you pour the concrete foundation and the oven slab. Hefting 80 pound sacks of concrete mix and shoveling the wet cement is hard work. Regardless of gender, you'll want to have a couple of friends help out for that part. All in all, it's pretty satisfying work.

How many bricks did it take?

Hmmm, that's a tough one. I'm going to have to get the photographs out and count them! There are 70 firebricks on the hearth; I cut 12 more to make the decorative row in the front, and I keep 4 on hand to stand in the doorway to control the draft when firing the oven. I probably used 175 common red bricks for the oven, entry and chimney.

What did it cost to build?

Again, I'm afraid I didn't keep good track. It probably cost about $750 US, including renting a small cement mixer twice and buying the tools I needed. Besides the bricks I mentioned above, there are the equivalent of about 45 8x16 cement blocks in the base, though I used several half-blocks there. And there are probably 30 80 pound sacks of cement, eight bottles of rust-color cement coloring, several sacks of mortar mix, one sack of fireclay, one sack of portland cement, and several hundred pounds of sand. The latter three are used to make heat resistant mortar for the oven proper. Hmm, what else? Two sheets of 6 inch wire mesh, some rebar (I'll post pictures of the rebar layout in the upper slab), and materials for the frame: steel framing studs & cement fasteners, cement board & drywall screws, chicken wire, stucco, and lots of pearlite.

How long does the oven hold its heat?
How hot does the inside of the oven get?

With a good two hour fire and a 20 minute rest with the fire in the back, the center of the floor of the oven is at about 750ºF. After about 90 minutes of pizza party this is down to about 500ºF. I keep a fire going in the back of the oven throughout. Lately I've been burning scrap lumber, mostly 4x4 and 2x4 I picked up at a construction site, so it burns rather quickly.  Anyway, back to the question: you can bake pizzas for about 90 minutes. You can roast any kind of meat with heat to spare. I'd guess you could bake two sets of bread loaves without refiring, either. With the oven closed off by a wooden door, it holds heat well... it was about 200ºF the morning after a pizza party.

How hard was it and where did you get the plans?

I had no experience with masonry whatsoever, and I had no trouble with this. One nice thing is that most of the brickwork isn't visible! And by the time you get to the parts that are visible (the doorway, for instance), you'll have enough experience to do a passable job. I recommend getting a good book on masonry work from the library. I found one in my town, published in the 1950's. Nothing's changed since then, so that was good enough. And I got the plans from Alan Scott's book, which I showed at the beginning of this page.

Instead of stucco (which is nice) could you finish the outside in brick?

Yes, you can finish the oven any way that pleases you and fits into your environment, as long as it's fire and heatproof. The Bread Builders shows several of Alan Scott's ovens, finished various ways with brick and stone. They're just beautiful. I used stucco because I wanted it to be lightweight and simple.

I'm still not sure about how to build the cement slab. What holds it up?

The oven slab (the one in midair) sits on the cement block base. It's reinforced with rebar. The largest unsupported area is about 2' by 2'. It's really not a problem. The slab was cast in place. I built form edging around the cement block base, cut plywood to fit the large open spaces in the block base and supported them from below, and covered the block cores with expanded metal lath (mesh). When the concrete was cured, I pulled the plywood out from below. I'll post pictures of this part of the construction soon. It was pretty fun.

Now that you built it, is the size adequate for your purposes?

Well, just barely. It could have been maybe 8" wider and deeper, but I needed it to fit in my yard. I recommend that you build a mock-up with of the oven floor and doorway  before you build anything, and see if your pizza and turkey pans fit!

How did you measure the temperature of the oven?

I built three thermocouples into the brickwork. Thermocouples are wires that generate a small voltage that varies with temperature. One is just under the floor of the oven: I drilled up through the concrete base and most of the way into one of the firebricks for that one. One is the brickwork arch in the top of the oven, and one is in the concrete cladding over the arch. I used a small hand-held thermocouple meter to make some measurements, and I'm building an electronic version with an LCD display but that's not finished yet.

How was the chimney built?

The chimney is the vaguest part of Alan Scott's plans, and I had to figure it out. Basically I set a terra-cotta flue pipe standing at the back on the sloped row of bricks coming down from the oven arch, and at the front on the entryway arch that you can see on the face of the oven. Then I built a chimney around it about halfway up.I won't try to explain it in any more detail; would take too long and probably would not help. I have pictures that show what I did, I'll get them posted.

Do you really need a chimney?

You could omit the front entryway -- the tunnel and arch. However, I don't recommend this. First, lots of smoke and flame come out of the oven during the initial firing. Without the chimney, this would blacken the front of the oven and would be a fire hazard. Also, as the oven heats, it cokes the wood and the fire goes wild. You want a slow, even burn. The entryway lets you moderate the fire by placing a row of bricks across the face of the entrance. This limits the air supply while still letting the smoke go up the chimney.

Did you place mortar on the top of your oven, or is that just vermiculite on top

The oven sides and arch (which you can see in the photos above) are encased in about 3" of concrete top and sides, for strength and heat storage. The space between the clad oven and the walls are filled with pearlite, which is like vermiculite. I'll get some sketches posted which will make this clearer.

Where to the ashes go?

There is a slot toward the front of the oven that goes through the concrete slab into a space built into the concrete block base. You just rake the ashes into the slot.  Even if there are still glowing coals they'll be fine down in the ash pit. The ash slot should be deep in the entry tunnel about 2" in front of the doorway bricks & angle iron. I put my slot too far forward. Not a functional problem but I have to worry about rainwater running in. The tricky part is that you have to decide where the slot goes before you pour the hearth slab. You make the slot by putting a piece of wood in the form to leave a void and knock it out after the concrete is set.

Does the fire brick on the oven floor have grout?

No, the firebricks forming the hearth are set into a very thin layer of 50/50 fireclay and sand, per Alan Scott's instructions. Everything else is set with heat-resistant mortar.

I'm afraid of building an oven and then having an uneven cooking surface. I was told the inserts with the Italian ceramic bottoms eliminated this problem.

The bricks are pretty darned even. When you set them into the clay/sand paste, you press on them with a board to level them out. It works well enough. At $750 for a brick oven and well over $5000 for a factory-made oven, I'll take the bricks, even or not. Besides, I think there's nothing more charming than the faint impression of bricks on the bottom of a crusty hearth-baked loaf. This can go too far, though. From the Tom Jaine book that I mentioned earlier:

[In the Wiltshire village of Purton] Job Jenkins was loitering in the churchyard when he had the brainwave to use the old tombstones as a new floor for his oven. Quickly coming to an arrangement with the parish clerk, he had the mason install them. To his horror, when he withdrew the first batch of bread baked on the new floor, he found the mason had placed the tombstones inscription uppermost so that instead of a baker's mark, each loaf bore some phrase from the funerary inscription.

The words on every loaf were marked
That had on tombstone been,
One quartern had 'in memory of'
Another 'here to pine,'
The third 'departed from this life
At the age of ninety nine.'

I live in Hawaii. Where do I buy firebrick?

I never thought of it before, but I guess fireplaces aren't in great demand in the tropics. You might check in the phonebook and call some masons or construction companies to see where they get their supplies. (NB: This visitor ordered his bricks from Shamrock Building Materials in San Rafael, CA, where I had bought mine, and had them shipped to Hawaii).

It doesn't look like you added an insulation layer on the oven slab or under it.

You're right, I skipped that step. In Alan's larger ovens he puts a layer of foamy vermiculite/cement under the hearth slab and suspends the slab off the block base for added insulation. Since I'm on an occasional and small-load baker, I'm not trying to get three bakes out of one firing. I saw that Alan's smallest oven (in the set of plans I bought from him) and the oven described in Tom Jaine's book omitted the slab insulation and connected the slab directly to the base. So I felt it was OK to do that. By the way, after a two hour firing and a 90 minute pizza party, the bottom of the slab, which I can touch by reaching under the wood storage area of the base, is hot to the touch, but not scorching. 

I was wondering which plans did you use - ordered plans or from a book?

I mostly used the plans from the oven in The Bread Builders, but I scaled it down by about 8" in width and 12" in depth. I felt comfortable doing this because I had ordered plans and looked at the Jaine book, and saw that everything was pretty much the same regardless of size (except for the bit about the insulated base, which I mentioned in the previous answer). You could get away with just The Bread Builders. On the other hand, getting that book plus the Jaine book plus a set of Alan's plans won't set you back much relative to the cost of the oven.

Why can't the rebar slab serve as your oven floor?

Concrete loses its strength when it gets hot and the strength doesn't come back when the concrete cools. So, building a fire right on concrete is a bad idea. Bricks are made to take the heat.

I need sources/leads for materials.

I bought almost everything at Home Depot. (Helpful note: you can put 40 bricks in the trunk of a Saturn). Any building supply place should have everything you need. Firebricks can be trickier, you may need to hunt around for those. I had to drive 20 miles. Look in the yellow pages under Masonry Supplies. A place that sells firebricks can also sell you mason's sand and fireclay in sacks, which are going to be of better quality than what Home Depot sells. For the angle iron that sits on the two doorway bricks and holds up the angled bricks slanting down from the arch: look under Metals or Steel. You want a place that sells construction steel. I was a little intimidated going into the steelyard but they were helpful and friendly.

Where do I get an arch form?

You'll make it yourself. When you're ready to build the arch, you'll measure the distance to be spanned and mark it out on a piece of plywood. Then, you stand some bricks on edge on the sheet of wood and figure out how many bricks you'll need to span the arch. You'll arrange them as desired, trace the outline of the arch with a pencil, then cut two copies with a scroll saw. The two wooden arches are nailed to a piece of lumber that serves as a spacer. Voila.

Do you use one of those giant wooden spatulas to load and unload the pizza?

Yes, it's actually called a peel. They come in wood and aluminum. I have one of each and find the aluminum one a bit easier to use -- it's thinner. I found mine at East Bay Restaurant Supply (Oakland, CA) for about $15. They come in several widths and handle lengths. A restaurant supply company in a large city should carry them, or you might try www.chefsfirst.com (they don't list their aluminum peels on the website but you might be able to write to them to ask for one. Also, check out the pizza bubble popper!)

To use it, sprinkle the peel with cornmeal, place the pizza on it, reach it into the oven, and yank the peel out with a snap. As in the parlor trick of pulling a tablecloth off of a table, the pizza will stay behind (as long as it hasn't sat too long on the peel and gotten stuck, in which case, if no one's looking, you can scrape up the resulting disaster, roll it into a ball, bake it and tell the guests it's cheese bread).

If all goes well, after a minute or two the dough will be set and you can use the peel to pick the pizza back up again. You'll need to rotate the pizza a couple of times during baking to cook it evenly -- the back side near the fire cooks first.

Was it worth all the work in the end?

Absolutely! Get your copy of The Bread Builders, your bricks and your building permit, and get going!