Brick oven cooking - plans and instructions

[devlin]

I have an Alan Scott oven (co-author of "The Breadbuilders") and we do everything in the oven. It's one of the small commercial models, meaning, in other words, it's big, bigger than most folks would want for home use. But he has much smaller models as well.

The suggestion that the Italian pizza ovens are "domed" as opposed to the Alan Scott ovens is misleading. Alan Scott's ovens are all domed. If you build it without a dome, you've done something seriously wrong. The theory of the necessity of flames bouncing off the Italian dome for appropriate heat is equally true of Alan Scott's ovens, and in fact it's part of the design.

We do pizza and all sorts of other foods (in addition to the breads) in our oven, and it works beautifully, taking just a couple of minutes for the super thin crust Italian style pizzas which we love. We keep a small fire going off to one side and it does precisely what's been noted of the round ovens, the flames bouncing off the top and over the top of whatever you're cooking.

You can do it either way, the long burn for breads and then raking everything out and starting a bake with a clean oven, or, as we do it, after that bake, building a smaller fire off to the side in the still hot oven and then waiting for a little more heat (up to 900 degrees usually, which is what I prefer) with the fire going as you bake the pizza.

We did the same for our Thanksgiving dinner this year, roasting two turkeys a couple of desserts and all the ancillary stuff all together in one firing, the fire going continuously in the back off to the side, and it worked beautifully.

Here's ours (again, it's big.... if we were using it just for a home kitchen, we'd have done a much smaller one)

[devlin]

I meant to note as well that none of the pizza ovens (that I can recall) used by the professional pizza guys in the national pizza competition I saw on food network this past year were the round pizza ovens. From what I remember, they were all some variety of rectangle or square, with, of course, the domed ceiling.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking the round pizza ovens. Not at all. I've had pizzas from both types, in this country and in Italy. And not all Italian pizza ovens are round. There are many different types of ovens used for pizza in Italy, and in this country as well.

But I thought it was important to respond to some of what it seemed to me were misconceptions about the Alan Scott/bread/rectangular/square ovens mentioned here.

[FornoBravo]

I meant to note as well that none of the pizza ovens (that I can recall) used by the professional pizza guys in the national pizza competition I saw on food network this past year were the round pizza ovens. From what I remember, they were all some variety of rectangle or square, with, of course, the domed ceiling.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking the round pizza ovens. Not at all. I've had pizzas from both types, in this country and in Italy. And not all Italian pizza ovens are round. There are many different types of ovens used for pizza in Italy, and in this country as well.

But I thought it was important to respond to some of what it seemed to me were misconceptions about the Alan Scott/bread/rectangular/square ovens mentioned here.

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[FornoBravo]

There is a lot of information and mis-information out there. For example, Italian wood-fired ovens are round, though the enclosure around them may square or rectangle. But this isn't really the right place to go into that sort of detail. If you are interested in exploring brick ovens further, there is a user goup, much like this one, dedicated to brick oven building and cooking.

You can find it at http://www.fornobravo.com/forum.

James

Edited June 16, 2006 by FornoBravo (log)