Results tagged “Brick Oven”

One of the biggest things I will miss in Bermuda is my brick oven. I built this thing and have only had a year to enjoy it! I knew going into it that I would really only have a year or so with the oven. I have always considered this my practice pizza oven, with many others to follow. We needed to have one final pizza party to say goodbye to the oven. Mandi and I decided to take this as an opportunity to try out some weirder toppings we haven't had a chance to do yet. We even asked some friends to bring over their favorite ingredients for us to throw on the pizzas. All in all, it was a great goodbye to the oven.

As I mentioned earlier this week, we had some impromptu pizza this weekend that I was very happy about. We made pizza about a month ago, but before that, the last time was probably October! My pizza oven was growing roots. We came up with 4 new pizza varieties this time around and I wanted to share them with everyone. If you want to know all the basics of pizza making, be sure to check out the pizza week extravaganza I put together back in October.

It's hard to call something as delicious as this a failure, but really we were unable to do what we set out to do so in my mind I mark it with an F. The goal was to make chicken tikka masala and put it on a raw naan dough. Cook that dough in the pizza oven and basically have an Indian pizza. The main problem here was that naan dough does not have the stretching capabilities that the pizza dough we make has. It is unable to hold all of those toppings and was falling apart in the oven. We should have done the trick of grilled pizza where you cook it on one side, flip and add the toppings, but we did not think of it at the time.

As my really O.G. fans would know, I made chicken tikka once before, but it wasn't that good. The naan was crap and the flavor was bland. Now that I am a little more experienced in Indian cooking, I found this to be easy and much more delicious. I suggest this dish to anyone (just not the pizza part).

"This was a Pizza Hut
Now it's all covered with daisies
you got it, you got it

And as things fell apart
Nobody paid much attention -Talking Heads

Prepare yourself, I have a lot of pictures today, and you better look at every single one! I normally like to max out my posts at about 35 to 40 pics, but today I couldn't discriminate. I'm just so happy about my new oven! Honestly, if you have the space, you could easily make one too! It was just me and two of my friends who built this and none of us have any masonry experience. It cost me a little over 400 dollars (in Bermuda where everything costs more) and only took us a total of about 10 hours. The three of us got together after work once a week and worked for about 2 hours each time. About 5 weeks later it was completed. Honestly my two friends did most of the manual labor; I was the brains of the operation. I took lessons from my Grandfather who taught me a long time ago how to be a good foreman. Here are the pictures of the whole process. There's not much else to tell you other than that the end result is totally worth it. I would have liked to add insulation to the outsides, but I couldn't find the stuff in Bermuda and was also running out of money so I decided to just leave it. Because of this, it doesn't stay hot for almost 24 hours on only one firing like many brick ovens do. Had I insulated it, it would have taken a lot more money, and way more time.