Mountain Fiesta 36” Pizza Oven

For a wedding venue outside Asheville, NC we built a 36″ (inside diameter) true brick pizza oven.  The oven was built with a thickness of 2 1/4″ in the dome for fast heat up as the oven was planned for periodic rather than constant use and would be used primarily for pizza (live-fire, high-temp baking).  The thin shell was wrapped in several layers of high performance ceramic blanket insulation and sealed with an additional layer of vermiculite-cement for a tight, heat-retaining envelope.

Building a true-brick oven without forms involves precise cutting and laying techniques.  An oven built with many bricks, tightly laid together with minimal mortar, is well-suited to take the stresses of expansion and contraction that wood-fired ovens endure.  Ovens built with care and craft, brick by brick, are more attractive, more durable, and more soulful than the majority of today’s kit ovens, which are assembled from a few large pieces that have been cast in a shop.