An oil drum (barrel) and a bit of metal pipe is all you need to make a really simple but effective pizza oven. It may not look very fancy but it works well and it will cook a whole lot of pizza. Also, instead of waiting for days/weeks for your clay oven to dry enough to use, an earth oven can be made and used on the same day. Which is really handy if you have a few people coming round.
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A few notes on our oven –
First up, thanks a million to Maggie, Bill and Michael who arrived from the U.S. just in time to help build this oven. They also did most of the filming for this – and Michael made some excellent pizza dough too. Thanks guys – you were great!
The soil/earth/stones are vital to keep the heat in – but you could use sand, clay or bricks too. (Don’t use bark mulch or anything similar as it will catch fire for sure.) On our oven the soil ended up being around 8” thick at the top – which was good but more than was really needed. (We would have built the whole thing into a bank, which would have saved a lot of work, but there wasn’t one handy.) I would suggest you aim for 6” minimum.
The chimney pipe isn’t essential – the fire would burn anyway – but it makes controlling the fire easier. You need a hot oven which means a fast burning fire. Take it down or block it off when the fire is out to retain the heat.
Fuel – small section dry branches are best for a fast, hot fire. You don’t want a smouldering cool fire, so perhaps your very first job is to prep your fuel and leave it to dry somewhere (we cut ours to length and left it in the greenhouse for a week).
Only thin flat foods can be cooked at such high temperatures – hence pizzas and flans. As the oven cools you can try thicker breads and cakes – and you could cook a casserole over night too. On the day we made this video, we were cooking for over an hour and the oven could have cooked for quite a while longer.
The sand/blocks inside, and the soil outside, were all damp, so some heat was needed to dry them out before they could really heat up. Drying them first would have helped but obviously wasn’t essential. If we keep this oven covered then it will always be ready to jump into culinary action.
You don’t need a wooden door – you could just use the drum lid – but timber is an insulator so it should keep more heat in. Also, the weight of the soil squashed the barrel a bit, so the lid didn’t fit properly. Draughts are the worst – try to keep it closed up really tight. You could use bricks for a door too. Our wooded one was scorched black – but a splash of water stopped it combusting.
If you’re interested in the rounders game you might like to see last year’s match…
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