Brick Pizza Oven

Nothing beats making your own homemade pizza. Pizza tastes great, feeds lots of people, and it never gets old. But buying pizza from the big name food chains can be very expensive, especially if you have a lot of people to feed. And those frozen pizzas you find at the store usually taste like crap. The best solution to these problems is to buy yourself a brick pizza oven and make your own pizza!

Of course you don't have to get a brick pizza oven, it can be made out of almost anything, but brick offers some distinct advantages. First and foremost, it looks great. Unlike a wooden oven, you can build a brick oven right into your house or your outdoor deck. Even if you don't install it directly into your house, brick encasements look good anywhere you put them.

Brick also gives your homemade pizza a unique taste and crunch. It will taste so much better than a pizza purchased from a pizza chain because of the way it's cooked. Some people like their pizza cooked in a wooden oven as well, but that just comes down to personal preference.

With a brick pizza oven, you won't have to worry about anything catching on fire either. Unless you soak your entire brick oven with gasoline, the bricks will not catch on fire or fall apart under the intense heat. A pizza oven made of brick gives you unlimited cooking styles as well, so you'll really never get tired of pizza!

Just like you would do with a traditional oven, you should let your brick oven pre-heat to the temperature you're going to be cooking at, re-adjusting the coals to make sure it's perfect. If you're only cooking for your family, your brick pizza oven will tell you when it's done, because the dome of the oven will usually turn white.

You shouldn't only depend on the "white dome" method to determine when your pizza is finished, especially if this is a new oven. You should check on the pizza every 10 minutes to make sure it's not getting burnt. If you use different ingredients and toppings, that will also affect the time it takes to finish cooking.

One of the most popular cooking styles in a brick pizza oven is the "Fire in the oven" style. You heat up your oven between 600 and 700 degrees, let the entire oven get hot, and throw your pizza in. Don't go anywhere! Your pizza will be finished in just a couple of minutes at these temperatures.

You can also just use regular baking in the oven, just as you would bake a frozen pizza in your traditional oven. The temperature here should be around 400 degrees so it doesn't cook too fast, but still holds all the flavor. Generally, baking your pizza will take about ten minutes.

I have my oven setup at the entrance of my backyard garden. I have bricks surrounding my garden, so a brick stove fits in perfectly just for decoration. But it's also the perfect way to BBQ and cook pizza at the same time.

If you love to cook, and you're looking to save money in a tough economy, investing in a brick pizza oven will benefit your wallet and your taste buds. It will also complement your house, and potentially raise the value of your home.