It is official! Roma Stone has now started catering events! Roma Stone catered to the Signs On the Trail 5k and it was a huge success (thanks to the many who helped). The wood fired pizzas were perfect! The oven was heated and hummin’ with eager customers ready for the wood fired pizza goodness. Far too many customers asked for the recipes to our dough though. A lot of other people asked where our restaurant was and if Roma Stone could cater an event for them. Unfortunately, we had to tell them that our restaurant was in the works, but fortunately, we can cater for anyone now.
All in all the event was a great success. We were making pizzas as fast as we could. In fact, Roma Stone sold out of pizzas in two and a half hours! Next year we will plan to make a lot more pizzas. We look forward to the next Signs On the Trail 5k.

You can learn more about the event by visiting www.signsonthetrail.com

Making a backyard mud or clay oven is a great family project, and once completed, you will be able to make fantastic hearth breads, and professional quality pizza. A mud oven is a wood burning oven, which used the residual heat from the firing to cook with.

A basic backyard oven can be made for next to nothing, and will be a very satisfying project for the whole family. There will be lots of mud and squishing and stuff; and kids will definitely enjoy the process.

A cob or clay oven is vastly superior to your conventional oven for pizzas and bread. The massive radiant heat that is stored in thick mud walls will deliver deep crusts to your bread, and you can keep a live fire going to make fantastic pizzas in about 3 minutes! You can never get your home oven hot enough to really make a great pizza, but your wood fire mud oven can get seriously hot.

The steps as follows are a pretty basic guide, and if you get inspired, you can visit the links at the bottom the page for more information.

Basically all you need is sand, clay, and hay. The hay serves as insulation, so if you have another insulation that you’d prefer to use (rice hulls, cellulose etc.) you can substitute for the hay. The hay should be chopped small, for easier mixing.

You are going to make the oven using to different mixtures of “mud”. The outer mixture, under and over the oven, will be a very light mixture, using as much insulating hay, and as little sand and clay as possible, and the inner layer, will use no hay, and be a heavy and dense mixture, perfect for heat storage.

To start, make a fire proof platform for your oven. It is easier to use if you raise this up to at least waist height, but you can certainly do it on the ground if you’d prefer to simplify the project (that’s what I did!). A good base for the oven is a layer of rock. On top of this lay about 8 inches of clay/sand/hay mixture. You want to use as much hay as you can, but the mixture must still sort of stick together. Clay and sand should be added in a ratio of 4 parts sand, to one part clay.

The mixing of this is both the fun part, and also the hard part. It is best mixed with your feet, ala squishing grapes for wine! Lay a tarp on the ground, and add your sand/clay mixture, and as much water as needed to make a thick mud. Keep adding hay until the mixture will no longer make a sticky ball. You should be able to take a baseball sized lump of this stuff, drop it from waist height, and have it still stick together.

Now for the hearth floor. You can either use a mud floor, or a brick floor. If using bricks, lay down a quarter inch of sand, and lay the bricks down until they exceed the oven diameter eventually wanted by a couple of inches. You can either use regular red bricks, or fire bricks. Red bricks should work fine, but fire bricks will last longer. Lay the bricks on their sides, to make the hearth floor about 4 inches thick.

If using mud, mix as before, omitting all the hay. You don’t want to add more than one part clay to the mixture of four parts sand, as the clay will crack when dried if there is not enough sand. Basically, use as little clay as you can get away with. Lay the “mud” down until you have reached the size wanted for the hearth floor. The mud floor will not be as durable as a brick floor, but if you are only going to be using the oven occasionally, it should be fine.

Next you want to make a mold of the interior dome of the oven. This is very easily done using wet sand. Make a mound of sand, and add water as needed so that it will all stay together. When finished, cover with wet newspaper all over.

The height of the oven is not really that important, as long as the height of the door is 63% of the height of the top of the oven’s interior. This ratio is quite important for correct airflow when firing your oven. If you don’t get the door/height ratio right, it will be a lot harder to keep a fire going inside the oven. For example, if your oven interior was 20 inches tall, then your door should be about 13 inches tall.

On top of the sand mold, lay about 4 inches of the clay/sand mud; don’t forget to leave the doorway free! On top of this mixture, add another 6-8 inches of the insulating hay mud.

Presto chango…you’ve made an oven!

It’s best to let the whole thing dry out quite slowly. The likelihood of cracking increases if you try to heat the oven to promote drying. After a few days, if you want to speed things up, you may light a few small fires in the oven.

The oven should be completely dry after a couple of weeks, and ready for use. Many people use a hardwood door carved into the shape of their door frame.

When ready to use, light a big fire in the oven, and let it burn for a few hours. Sweep out all the ashes, close the door and wait for bout half an hour and you’re good to go.

Alternatively, you can make pizza in the Italian style by maintaining a small fire in the corner of the oven as you cook.

Using your oven is another subject entirely, and beyond the scope of this hub!

The preceding information was a pretty general guide, and is only meant to demonstrate how conceptually easy and inexpensive the building of a backyard oven can be. They work very well, and your pizzas and breads will be the envy of the neighborhood.

Enjoy!

For me, all this is about eating wonderful foods prepared by our selves and cooked using a little fire in a wood burning pizza-bread traditional oven. It’s visually very pleasing, interesting, as well as efficient and economical. Your friends will be so impressed they will probably follow you by building something suspicious in their homes. Cook meats, roasts, casserole dishes, bake cakes and never have to clean the grease inside the oven → ever! It’ll burn in the oven’s hearth!

What is a wood burning oven?

A wood burning pizza/bread oven is an oven made out of clay adobe, refractory fire bricks or refractory concrete(heat resistant mix made from ingredients that can withstand prolonged high heat conditions). Traditionally, ovens were made using material that wasn’t costly and was easy to obtain in nature. Nowadays, we have everything we need to build a wood oven readily available in most refractory and building store yards.

Traditional wood burning pizza-bread ovens and cooking using a gentle fire are simply ‘the low TEC highly efficient technology’. So primitive and interesting, it will not let us down.

What do we actually do when we use a wood burning brick oven?

A fire is built inside the oven (now you may say: ‘I know that, but what’s next?’ – just kidding). The fire burns, giving off the heat which the heavy oven walls absorb. When the dome chamber inside is heated to flat white-hot, the fire is allowed to die down or kept burning only very gently for longer. The embers can be swept out of the oven or left somewhere aside in the oven.

Since the dawn of time, the quest for perfect homemade pizza has broken many a soul. Can roughly $50 worth of materials and a DIY brick oven-like housing change all that? I honestly don’t know. But if you’ve got a little extra time on your hands and fancy yourself a decently-talented pizza enthusiast then by all means, chase the dream.

Boing Boing Gadgets details an inexpensive home pizza oven setup consisting of less than $50 worth of materials. The bulk of the costs stems from a $30 pizza stone, while the rest is made up of locally-purchased firebricks. Everything fits into your existing oven, so you don’t actually have to build a big brick oven in your kitchen. Although if you have the space and the means to build your own gigantic wood-fired brick pizza oven, do it!

The basic process involves building a brick housing around your pizza stone and then waiting what’d probably feel like forever for your standard oven to heat up to almost 500 degrees. Apparently the added bricks mean added time, as it takes longer for everything to heat up. Plan for an additional 30 minutes of pre-heating. BBG suggests using an infrared thermometer to keep tabs on the heat, though it’ll add $45 to your costs. I’d probably just “give it maybe 30-60 minutes and hope for the best,” as is suggested should you opt to skip the thermometer.

Once everything’s all heated up, you’ll be subject to about 11 minutes of cooking time and “a more concentrated bake” since “the additional stones clearly refract heat from all directions.”