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| Fireclay Bricks In Wood Fired Pizza Ovens |
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| Building your own Wood Fired Pizza Oven may well be the most exciting and rewarding project that anyone can undertake in their own back yard. Wood Fired Ovens have been with us for hundreds of years, and have recently been gaining significant popularity all around the world.
There are quite a few misconceptions around how wood fired ovens actually work,, which can lead to the wrong materials being used to build the walls and floor of the oven. The most common mistake people make is choosing the wrong kind of bricks. Many are under the impression that a wood fired oven should be constructed using insulating fire bricks, so that the heat from the fire is 'trapped' inside the cooking area. Although you need your oven to be well insulated, these are definitely not the right bricks to use, and I will explain why.
The idea of cooking in a wood fired pizza oven is very simple; wood is burnt inside the oven over a period of time, and the heat from that fire is 'soaked up' or 'absorbed' by the walls and floor of the oven. When the walls and floor of the oven have reached the required temperature, the fire is allowed to die down and is pushed to one side. In go your pizzas, roast, bread or whatever has taken your fancy. The heat retained in the floor bricks is then conducted into the base of the pizza making it delicious and crispy. The heat absorbed by the walls of the oven is then radiated down onto the top and sides of the food, cooking it to perfection.
For the walls and floor of the oven to soak up enough heat to stay hot for long enough to cook your pizzas, they need to be dense. The greater the density of the brick, the more heat it can absorb, and the longer it will stay hot for. Lightweight, low density insulating fire brick is an excellent insulator, but will not hold a lot of heat due to its low density. A good quality wood fired oven should be built with dense fire bricks, to make sure the oven stays hot for long enough to cook your food.
So how can you tell them apart? A dense fire brick the size of a standard house brick will weigh approximately 3.5kg, whereas an insulating fire brick will weigh closer to 500g. That's the easiest method!
If you build your oven using quality dense fire bricks, it will take more than an hour to properly heat up, however ovens built like this are known to maintain high temperatures for more than 24 hours. You can cook pizza at 850 degrees Fahrenheit in the evening, then bake bread in the same oven the following morning!
Remember, if you build it right, you are going to have your pizza oven for years and years to come. Do your research, understand the materials and their properties, and you'll be well on your way to building your own wood fired oven in your back yard. Hopefully now you understand a little better the fundamentals of how these wood fired ovens work, so good luck and may your pizza peel be ever busy!
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