You know what marks the official start of spring for us? Is it the first spring flowers? No. Is it the first
sighting of a stork? Nope. Working
outside in a t-shirt? Blossoms on the fruit trees? The Game of Thrones trailer
being released? No. Non. Ne.
For us, spring officially starts when we make pizza in our bread oven
and eat blisteringly hot pizza in the sunshine. So, I’m pleased to report that
spring officially arrived last Saturday.
To explain, I should go back in time a bit. Almost two years
ago, we made ourselves an outdoor bread oven in the half-built summer kitchen
that we were working on at the time. I was going to write about it back then, but wanted
to wait until we’d properly finished the summer kitchen so I could share photos
of everything together. However, what I didn’t take into account was the fact
that we now live on Bulgarian time, so a job that we thought would take about
four months still isn’t finished almost two years later. The summer kitchen is
about 90% finished, which is good, but it’s been 90% finished for about a year,
which is not so good. We really need to crack on and finish it, but Rob’s been
doing all the building work himself and having to fit it in around other
priorities. Anyhow, it will be
finished in the next month. Expect glorious photos of a totally, absolutely,
100% finished summer kitchen in a month’s time. Or maybe two. After all, this
is Bulgarian time.
Back to the pizza oven, which we did manage to finish. Ordinarily,
I try not to eat too much bready stuff because it gives me weird pains all up
and down my right side if I eat it too often. (Hypochondria alert.) But
who can resist a homemade pizza every now and then (and, by every now and then,
I obviously mean at least once a week)? I’m not exaggerating when I say being
able to cook homemade pizzas in a wood-fired outdoor oven has transformed our
summers (and springs, and autumns, and, er, waistlines). It’s so … theatrical.
It’s the highlight of a weekend, firing up that bad boy and merrily paddling
pizzas in and out.
We use it for other things too: baking cakes (many hours
after first lighting the oven – at its hottest, it gets up to about 700°C),
roasting veg, roasting tomatoes for our freezer tomato sauce, drying tomatoes, etc. But
nothing quite beats shuffling a pizza in and dragging out a bubbling,
volcano-like beauty three minutes later. Seriously, it’s way better than TV. You guys should try it.
If you’re looking for a detailed tutorial on how to build a
pizza oven, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. You have to be surprisingly
precise when building a pizza oven – you need to get the cob mixture just
right, and the size of the door opening needs to be calculated in
relation to the height of the burning chamber. I forget the specifics. Did I
mention we did this two years ago? Just follow this handy three-part tutorial
on YouTube, like we did.
Think of this as more of a photo diary of that funny time we
built a pizza oven, back in lovely old 2015.
First, we dug up some clay from our garden and squelched
around in it, mixing in sand and, I think, straw. Honestly, my memory is not
what it used to be. I vaguely remember this stage was very fun.
We got lucky with a huge, beautiful and totally flat piece
of stone that we found in our garden. That formed the base to cook pizzas on.
On top of that, we built a dome of sand covered in brightly coloured magazine
paper (because, when you eventually dig out the sand, you know to stop digging
when you reach the coloured paper). Here Rob is layering up the clay mixture on
top of the sand dome.
Then he shaped the entrance to fit around a door that he’d
made in advance.
Then, after everything had suitably dried out (this may have been two days, or it may have been two weeks), we dug out the sand from inside.
We then covered the whole oven with a layer of lime plaster, to give it
some weather protection, as it was in the open part of the summer kitchen,
without a roof over it. Two years later, we’ve decided to put a roof over that
area, as we want to add a worktop and stove and turn it into a proper outdoor kitchen.
Once the roof is done, and we no longer need to worry about the pizza oven
getting wet, we’ll probably chip off the lime plaster, which has cracked and isn’t as
attractive as the clay anyway.
You don’t have to make a huge egg-shaped oven, like us. Cute little round ones are just as lovely and effective. But I rather enjoy its alien-pod quality. I keep expecting it to crack open and Robin Williams to emerge.