welcome friends this is the wood-fired clay brick pizza oven that Jules and I
picked up last fall and there's a few videos farther back on the channel where
we unboxed it and we fired it up for the first time and over the course of the
summer we're probably going to use it weekly for cooking pizzas and roasts and
all kinds of different things so we're gonna have a lot of content using this
clay brick wood oven and I hope the first thing we should do with it this
spring is learn how to start it because the first couple times I started it I
didn't do such a great job I tried to pack in too much wood pack it too
closely it didn't light quickly I got lots of smoke but not lots of fire so
here are some things that I've learned that will hopefully help you out when
you get a clay brick wood pizza oven the first thing is to start with wood that
is very small you don't want to use big logs you want to make sure that you cut
them fairly finely and resist the urge to pack the stove too tightly with this
wood the next thing you're going to need is is something that catches fire really
quickly and what I found I really like our cedar shavings and I just bought
some some cedar shakes at the home store and then used a wood plane to cut down
and make some shavings and I find that these work really well another thing
that I've seen pizza places use our egg cartons so if you have some egg cartons
these burn really well to help start the fire and of course there's the old
standby packing paper if you order anything from Amazon you'll probably
have reams and reams of this packing paper it's clean it lights really well
and it starts the fire easily you can also use these little fire starter cubes
I would make sure that you get ones that are all-natural these claimed to be
all-natural I think they're quar and wax so they won't give off any noxious fumes
they won't harm the inside of the oven personally I'm not going to use them
because I really like the cedar shavings but this is an option and of course the
last thing you're going to need is a really good butane torch these torches
burn hot they burn quickly lots of flame they start everything really fast so
let's build a fire okay so we essentially build a log cabin inside the
wood oven alternating back and forth build it kind of in the middle give it
lots of space lots of air now into the middle of that
I'm going to stick some of our curlicue cedar shavings and you can be quite
generous with them because there's a lot of space in between them a lot of air
and then on top of that another couple of layers of log cabin building and then
the top layer I'll lay two or three across just to let everything catch fire
now we come in with the butane torch
and a fire is lit
now once I've got that burning really nicely I take a couple of chunks of
larger wood and I just put them here at the mouth just to start preheating them
so that they're hot when I go to put them on to the fire helps them burst
into flames a lot faster it keeps the whole thing moving along
now at about the ten minute mark the fires going pretty well and I take the
larger logs and I just start building the fire up and that's it it's pretty
much going at this point now you just start loading in wood and building a
fire that will be appropriate to what you want to cook if you want to cook
pizzas you've got to get a really hot fire going you want to bring that up in
temperature right up if you're cooking like roasts or a porchetta or something
like that or chicken you want a low slow fire because you only really want to
reach about 350 degrees inside and that's something that you're going to
learn over time it's something that I'm still working on this is cooking with
live fire it's a lot of fun but it's a little bit more work than cooking in an
oven or in a barbecue but the payoff is well worth it so come on along what's
the next few episodes watch us cook cook along with us thanks for stopping by
hope to see you again soon