Well protected

All right British spring, you can rain as much as you blooming well want now!

Thanks to Pa, the pizza oven hat is finished. The oven is safe from the ravages of English weather and I’m looking forward to lighting a few fires to dry it out and get ready for pizza season :)

In other news, I’m still knitting away at my blue raspberry socks and getting stuck in to the second sleeve of my bellringing jumper. Darling Sister Two is home for the holidays now so there is a lot of sisterly sewing action going on too. More on that to come!

Pizza oven rescue!

The lovely spring weather we’re starting to have means that our thoughts are turning once again to pizza cooked outside in the wood fired oven. All winter, the oven has been sheltering under a plastic sheet, intended to keep it from being washed away by rain. As you can see in the photos below, this wasn’t entirely successful. On a few windy occasions the sheet was blown off and the oven was exposed leading to some of the surface being eroded.

That wooden frame though is the  beginnings of a proper shelter for the oven. Pa is masterminding the design. That is to say he is making it up as he goes along which means I don’t really know what it’s supposed to look like. The idea though is to have it in 5 removable pieces – the base (pictured), 4 walls and a roof.

I’m also planning to get some hydraulic lime and do a surface render to pretty the oven up and give it a bit more protection from the weather.

In the meantime though it’s enjoying the sun and drying out again. I’ll light a few little fires in the coming days and hopefully we’ll be able to have some pizza when Darling Sister Two comes home for the holidays :D

Pizza oven accessories

After singeing all the hairs on my arm after the first pizza making trial I decided that I really needed to make some tools that were fit for purpose.

 

First up – a peel. Using an old stair spindle and a piece of hardwood and a bit of sawing and filing I managed to make a pretty nice one, just the right size for my oven doorway.Then, a longer handle on my brush. I bought a brush from the local hardware shop for sweeping the oven floor clean of ashes before cooking and also for cleaning out the ash when the fire had burnt out. But with the temperatures inside the oven reaching up to 450°C sticking my arm in to do this wasn’t ideal. Although basic, this fix means that if the bristles on my current brush get burnt out, I can just buy another and attach it easily to the extended handle.Finally, I had already made a door for the oven out of old bits of 2-by-4  with some batons and handles to hold the thing together. I also bought a thermometer that will hopefully allow me to gauge the internal temperature of the oven more accurately and made a hole in the centre of the door to insert the probe.