Everybody loves pizza. Even better if it’s freshly baked and homemade! You don’t need to have an outdoor kitchen for this to be possible. This hand-built outdoor pizza oven is the solution.
This relatively cheap project will improve your backyard. It’s a great way to entertain guests during summer, and even during winter. It’s a great centerpiece that allows you to bake homemade bread and pizza, as well as slow cooking meat.
This project is so easy that even new DIYers can accomplish it. Make the workload even easier by getting your friends and relatives to help you out. After all, they’ll be around eating the bread and pizzas of your labor :)
Love freshly baked pizza and bread? Then build this DIY outdoor pizza oven!
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Materials:
- Sharp Sand (general purpose sand usually contains small amounts of aggregate)
- Builders Sand
- Cement
- Aggregate
- Bucket or Pot – for the chimney (optional)
- Bricks – heat resistant
- Large cellophane sheet
- Wood or Foam – for shaping the arch
- Pallet
- Chipboard – make sure it is for outdoor use
- Wood Screws
Tools:
- Trowel – for bricklaying
- Wood Saw
- Drill
- Spade – for mixing
Steps:
When you have decided on a location for the pizza oven, lay the pallet down and make sure that it is level. The floor that it is laying on might not be flat so use some off-cuts of wood to wedge under the pallet to raise it if needed.
Cut some strips of chipboard that are about 50mm high to form a perimeter around the top of the pallet. Make sure that there are no large gaps between the boards as this will form the seal to hold in the concrete!
Mix the concrete in a 1:2:4 ratio (1 part cement, 2 parts sharp sand, 4 parts aggregate). Use the spade to put the concrete in the wooden mold. You can use a long wooden baton lengthways to ensure that the concrete is flat and has the best finish. This top layer will create the floor for the pizza oven so try and get it as smooth as you can.
It is a good idea to roughly lay the bricks in the correct position before permanently fixing them in place. With the standard house brick, I would advise chopping them in half so you can have more shape to your pizza oven. Arranging the bricks before ensures that you know roughly where the bricks are going to go and also roughly how many you are going to need.
The arch is going to form the roof of the area where you access the inside of the oven. Generally speaking, the arch is about two-thirds the height of the whole oven. We used foam to create support but you could use layered cardboard or even off-cuts from the chipboard to create the curve on which the archway bricks rest. This purely provides support whilst the archway bricks are drying.
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