Pizza Oven--Insulating with cob/adobe

Pizza Oven/Insulation added

Since far and away the most interest my art blog generates is for my home-made, adobe bread and pizza oven I thought I should reward all those random readers with an oven update.
As I said previously in my last Pizza Post, it is functional as it is now but would stay hot longer if it was better insulated. For a cob/adobe oven; insulation means: dirt/sand/clay mix but made into a slip by adding more water and then folding in hay or grass or sawdust. I had a big bag of woodshavings and sawdust from a neighbor's woodshop so that's what I used but I added some dried cut stemmy grass to give it a little more structural stablity.

Here is the process;
First I made some moist clay/soil mix and patched the few cracks that exist in the insulation layer I had built previously.

Then, I mixed up a wheelbarrow's worth of woodshavings/sawdust with clay/mud slip.
I mixed it with a shovel and then threw in a bucket of dried grass/stemmy clippings.
(Straw would have been better but I had a pile of cut grass).

Then I added about a two-inch layer, fistful at a time going around the base and then up the sides to meet a layer I had already added to the top. By slapping it on it didn't slump and the grassy bits helped meld the fistfuls together. I gently smoothed the surface and then added some scratches in the surface to help the next layer adhere/stick.
Now, I'll let it dry for a day or two and decide if I want to try to add a finish or smoother layer. It will take several days to dry out and I'll post again about how it works then.
But here is a photo of my last pizza: Potato and leek with garlic oil. It was tasty.

Wood fired Pizza

I promised all who were following my slow, intermittent mud/cob/adobe oven posts that I would post a photo once the oven was done and we made the first pizza.

Well, the oven isn't technically done; we did add a 2 1/2 inch layer of mud/woodshaving/sawdust insulation but it would really benefit from another layer of insulation and a finish plastering of mud/sand to help make it more weather resistant.


BUT, the working part; the clay shell and 1st layer of insulation is all you need to bake and like the impatient child that I am (and my kids were asking, when are you going to make pizza, Dad?") we lit up the fire.

I built a small starter fire and kept it going for 2 hours adding sticks of hardwood 3-4 times during that span. I made a sourdough dough the day before and used the leftover dough to make 3 10" pizzas. The oven worked great. The pizzas cooked in about 2-3 minutes and the bread cooked in 25 minutes (instead of the hour I usually need in my conventional oven at 450degrees F.) and the only problem was that my dough was too "sourdough" for a real Pizza margherita. Next time I'll mix up a bona fide pizza dough and make them a little thinner.