When you get that craving for wood-fired pizza and you are stuck at home in quarantine, it is not easy to replicate that beautifully blistered crust and slightly smoky, melty, cheesy goodness you get in the restaurant. Unless, of course, you have a custom-built wood-fired pizza oven in your kitchen or yard. Those can get expensive and easily put a $10k+ dent in your savings. That's a lot of "dough" for something you may only use a few times a year.
That’s why we jumped at the chance to build a high-performance wood-fired oven at home. The simple construction and fun instructions from Chef Steps made it super easy for us to keep our pizza-obsessed family, neighbors, and friends in check during quarantine while dining out was off limits. Follow these steps and you will be pumping out restaurant-quality pies in no time. We can already hear the neighbors asking you to sneak a few to them under the fence.
We modified the construction a bit because we had a hard time sourcing the 16" x 24" pavers from our local Home Depot. We ended up using 24" x 24" pavers from Home Depot and 47 standard clay bricks from a local brick and stone supplier, Riverside Brick & Supply Co.. If you aren't in the Richmond, VA area, you can just search Google for your nearest brick supplier and something will pop up.
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Do you think making your own pizza dough is too hard? Well, we are here to help change your mind by sharing an almost fool-proof recipe from Modernist Cuisine (Hint: we use AP flour and 10% more water per the recipe vs. adding the wheat gluten)