Beer Keg Becomes High-Performance Pizza Oven

Pizza varies all around the world, with several cities having put their own mark on the Italian dish. To make an authentic pie in the Neapolitan style requires extremely high temperatures in order to cook the pizza through in just a couple of minutes. Armed with a beer keg and some ingenuity, [AndrewW1977] got down to work, building a rig that could get the job done.

The build starts by cutting the keg in half. A series of zigzag steel pieces are welded inside, in order to give the refractory cement more surface area to stick to. With the cement poured and set, a handle was welded to the keg for ease of use, as well as a thermometer to monitor internal temperatures.

Initial attempts to cook using the rig used a wood-fired rocket stove design. This had the drawback of taking up to 45 minutes to reach the appropriate temperature, so the build then switched to using God’s Gas, clean burning propane, as a fuel source. With a jet-style burner installed in the base, the oven was ready to start turning out pizzas.

The idea of cooking a hot, fresh pizza in just a couple of minutes has us salivating at the possibilities. We’ve seen other high-speed pizza ovens, too. Video after the break.

14 thoughts on “Beer Keg Becomes High-Performance Pizza Oven

  1. Needs a grate above the pizza to keep the flames tucked nice and tidy above it. Modern pizza ovens create a wall of heat above and blow the pizza to cook them just right, easy enough with grating to achieve similar results in a low tech way.

  2. > requires extremely high temperatures in order to cook the pizza through in just a couple of minutes

    … no.

    My pizza oven uses roughly about 360°C, which isn’t even “high” (not to mention “extremely” high) and my pizza baking time is about 3 minutes per 24cm pizza.
    You need this temperature and more to bake “real bread” (double-baked dark bread, ask any grown up German what that is – you don’t get it at normal bakery shops any more, unfortunately).
    And no, there isn’t an issue with pizza and HCA (due to the non-sous-vide temperatures) because pizza doesn’t stay in the oven longer than 200-240 seconds. There are HCA concerns about dark bread, obviously, but I tend to prefer to enjoy my life and die than to not enjoy my life and die.

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