While it’s possible to make pizza from scratch at home right down to the dough itself, it’ll be a struggle to replicate the taste and exquisite mouthfeel without a pizza oven. Pizzas cook best at temperatures well over the 260°C/500°F limit on most household ovens while pizza ovens can typically get much hotter than that. Most of us won’t have the resources to put a commercial grade wood-fired brick oven in our homes, but the next best thing is this portable pizza oven from [Andrew W].
The build starts with some sheet metal to form the outer and inner covers for the oven. [Andrew] has found with some testing that a curved shape seems to produce the best results, so the sheet metal goes through rollers to get its shape before being welded together. With the oven’s rough shape completed, he fabricates two different burners. One sits at the back of the oven with its own diffuser to keep the oven as hot as possible and the other sits underneath a cordierite stone to heat from the bottom. Both are fed gas from custom copper plumbing and when it fires up it reaches temperatures hot enough that it can cook a pizza in just a few minutes. With some foldable legs the oven also ends up being fairly portable, and its small size means that it can heat up faster than a conventional oven too.
This is [Andrew]’s third prototype oven, and it seems like he has the recipe perfected. In fact, we featured one of his previous versions almost two years ago and are excited to see the progress he’s made in this build. The only downside to having something like this would be the potential health implications of always being able to make delicious pizzas, but that is a risk we’d be willing to take.
I’ve got an old electric powered oven from the 70ies which goes up to about 300 degrees C. It takes about 7 minutes to bake a pizza fully and tastes great, nice crunchy bite and puffy crust. Not as big as pizzas from a proper pizza oven though but close enough :) I used a large bathroom tile as heat capacity but this oven doesn’t appear to have enough heating capacity to make full use of it. I now use a teflon baking mat on grating. The bottom is nice brown/patchy like one from stone baked pizza. Who knows I’ll invest in an oven that can get around 470 degrees C or so. I think the pizza is not the only health hazard, the fumes at that point can be quite toxic as well when bits of topping drop on the oven bottom and burn up. Corn at 300 degrees C already smells really bad.
Be aware that teflon starts decomposing above 260c (t. wikipdia)
No pizza should have corn on it. (Or pineapple)
The pizza isn’t the health hazard here. You using teflon is. Use a steel or cast iron plate and season it to use in that oven, not teflon. You are putting your health at risk doing this. If you had a bird in the kitchen it would have dropped dead already.
No joke. Fumes from overheated teflon are a nontrivial chemical hazard, and the contact-chemistry isn’t much safer.
The pizza bakes so fast that the main mode of heat transfer is radiation, not contact or convection. It should be possible to use strong infrared emitters between a quartz glass window and a reflector and just dump a whole load of heat on the pizza from both sides at the flip of a switch.
Akron brown did similar https://laughingsquid.com/alton-brown-makes-a-beautiful-pizza-under-the-hot-lights-of-his-mega-sized-easy-bake-inspired-oven/
In one of his books he mentions that he rigged his oven so he can still open the door even during a self-cleaning cycle. Those cycles are seriously hot. He said he uses that with a ceramic “stone” and said it works really well.
“Alex the french guy” on youtube did the same thing. Ovens that have that lock usually have a system that can easily be disabled.
Same idea, but his 54 kiloWatts is mostly wasted on missing the pizza.
“Pizzas cook best at temperatures well over the 260°C/500°F limit on most household ovens”
This actually depends on the pizza. For premade/frozen pizzas, chemists in the food industry engineer foods for very specific conditions. This is why many ice creams will no longer get rock hard in a normal freezer. Perhaps I’m just being paranoid but it’s something to keep in mind.
Methinks if one is cooking DiGiornos in their lovingly-crafted super-whamodyne pizza oven, some examination of priorities may be in order. I’d be buying Italian “00”-flour, and considering making my own pepperoni from a pig I raised myself if I was going to build an oven like this. That being said, I’ll just admire it for now, as my wife would probably disown me if I decided I needed to add metal welding/fab tools to the “collection”.
I buy 00 flour anyways, it’s just better for many purposes. E.g. making gravy with it is easier.
If you’ve ever made homemade pizza, you’ll never eat frozen pizza again. It’s like comparing dog shit to a gordon ramsay dish
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Bread makes you fat ?:D
Most common ice creams don’t get rock hard in a freezer anymore because air doesn’t freeze. Let a quart of generic ice cream sit out until it fully melts and see how much liquid is left. It won’t be a quart.
What did they have before then? Not air?
The real reason is that they add propylene glycol and extra sugar in the emulsion to act as an antifreeze to suppress the freezing point, so all the water in the mixture doesn’t turn solid.
Ice cream actually has a legal definition that requires it to have at least a certain percentage of cream. Check the box next time you buy some Breyers, a lot of their flavors don’t say ice cream on them anymore, but instead say frozen dairy desert.
Also note that heating food with propane will result in your food being coated in a hydrocarbons. This is carcinogenic, so it will shave some time off your life.
Your food is hydrocarbons. Propane burns pretty cleanly.
There is a huge difference between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons. One is made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms while the other is hydrogen and carbon. The fat/grease in a pizza are hydrocarbons…
In other words, your food is hydrocarbons.
Your fuel may also be carbohydrates, especially when camping. Ethanol, propanol, methanol…
So you’re the guy who started the whole thing about “cancer warning labels” for coffee, which could be required under California’s Prop. 65!
Pretty much anything that’s cooked and goes through maillard reaction generates acrylamide and therefore has some level of carcinogenic implications.
No, just no
Propane is one hydrocarbon. Propane is a gas above -42⁰C, so it can’t coat anything. Propane is burned completely into CO2 and H2O.
This is taught in high school.
Nope. Perhaps very, very, nearly completely. This is learnt since high school, working with explosive and combustable gas mixtures for a decade or so.
Also, propane won’t be totally pure and if it’s UK patio gas, then it’s a quite wide cut/mix of light gasses. Great for simulating aircraft fuel/air mixtures in the lab.
I have an imitation big green egg that we accidentally found out it gets upwards of 800*F. We back pizza on it now. Can’t beat it AND it’s outside in case we manage to accidentally do other dangerous things at the same time we’re baking crispy pizza.
I’ve hit close to 900F using a Big Horn portable pizza oven I bought off Amazon for about $170. And that’s a pellet burner. I think a bunch of the portable ovens can do that. So why is this a big deal?
Nice job… but last week I built a pizza oven that hits 1000F just from the heat of a Beowulf cluster of overclocked 555 timer chips. Oh, and an Arduino.
Could have used a DiGiorino and a Brownian motion device
Commercial version: https://ooni.com/
We have Ooni Koda 16 and we love it!
All their product names look like pidgin Finnish… and that’s actually what it is. Huh.
“Pizzas cook best at temperatures well over the 260°C/500°F limit on most household ovens”
Actually the perfect temperature for the pizza base is about 215C.
Did you read that off the box when you took it out of the freezer
My $200 Bighorn pizza oven gets up to 1100