pizza oven Archives - The Year of Mud

In Part 2 of my ‘Build a Better Outdoor Cob Oven’ series, you’ll learn how to build a cob arch doorway, install a chimney, prepare a sand form, and build the actual cob dome of the oven.

This is where the real fun starts… Check it out below!

(Need a refresher from part 1 of the outdoor pizza oven series? Check it out here!)

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More than four years after I posted my how to build your own cob oven for $20, it is still the most popular entry on The Year of Mud. Clearly there is a big audience out there interested in building DIY backyard ovens. Gotta love that.

Since building several other ovens after the original $20 incarnation, however, we’ve made some significant improvements to our design, increasing the efficiency, the ease of use, and the baking potential. Needless to say, it’s hard for me to recommend the outline for the former design, because the new oven is so much superior.

I have finally begun an updated series on how to build a better cob oven, which I will begin posting next week. If you’re dreaming about projects you can do once spring rolls around, be sure to tune back in!

Update: Here’s where you can find the Better Outdoor Pizza Oven Plans!

What pizza do you want tonight?

When I was five years old or so, I proclaimed that I wanted “to be a pizza pie man” once I grew up. That dream was rekindled in 2009 when April and I built our first outdoor cob oven, and this year we’ve successfully vended pizzas for the first time. I guess I can say I have reached that place of being a “pizza pie man” now, at 30 years old. In all seriousness, it was truly a thrill, a combination of many of my passions rolled into one very fun experience: natural building, pizza (duh), and feeding people good food.

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Our first pizzas ready for the hungry masses

Amidst all of our timber framing work, we have been chipping away at our cob oven construction. In fact, we deemed it ready enough for a big ol’ pizza party this past week. The oven needs some finish plaster, but why wait? It proved to be a real workhorse, as April and I churned out about 50 pizzas (really, we lost count) for a big group of 40 people at the Clear Creek Festival grounds.

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The first fire in our new outdoor cob oven

In preparation for our Cob Oven Workshops, we did a “test” pizza party over the weekend. Over 20+ pizzas, 4 loaves of bread, 2 pans of zucchini bread, 2 cookie loafs, 1 pan of brownies, and 1 roast duck (homegrown!) later… I’d say it was a success. The oven was still holding over 200° 18 hours later! Wowzers. This is why I love outdoor cob ovens: they are extremely easy and cheap to build, you can take serious advantage of lots of heat to cook delicious food, and it’s an awesome social experience to gather around the oven while pizzas are flying out. An outdoor oven has all the right ingredients.

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