Brick Oven - v2.0

After using v1.1 of the brick oven a few times with mediocre results, I decided to tear it down and get to work on what I guess I will call v2.0.

v1.1 had some things about it that worked conceptually, although there were a few fundamental problems with it - the greatest of which was simply the fact that the lower portions of the oven simply did not get hot enough. The concept of setting food on bricks to make it higher within the oven seemed logical and worked from a temperature perspective, but the consequence of doing this was that the food inherited some funky flavors because it was in the flow of smoke, fumes and ash.

For v2.0, I gave up on the concrete slabs for the floor and ceiling in exchange for the more conventional use of bricks. While the benefit of the concrete slabs was that they made for a more simple construction, they clearly were not retaining the heat enough. And yes, I do know that any other blog I read said not to use concrete, so just nip it.

Without the concrete slab to serve as a base, v2.0 started with a wooden pallet. The idea of having side access to the fire was good, although having a smaller compartment for the fire made it a little hard to maintain and I suspect some heat was being lost through the roof instead of being able to flow more into the main oven. So the pallet also shifted the design to be a single rectangle:

While I suspect I may need to add an additional layer like a piece of concrete board, I wanted to test the concept of the design before investing too much so went straight to a layer of bricks:

These were the same red clay bricks that are available at Lowe’s which made a good 24″ x 36″ footprint. I am already anticipating that a future version will replace these with actual firebrick, but one version at a time! The footprint of the oven was a fair bit larger than previous versions, this was also done so I could use larger pieces of wood for the fire (v1.1 required me to chop wood into very small pieces).

The walls followed a similar structure as previous versions, the only adjustment I made was to make the height of the walls one brick layer less to decrease the volume of the oven’s interior. The height of the interior is still 7″ and seemed plenty tall enough for the things I’d be cooking, the theory was that it would also increase the temperature lower in the oven:

The roof completely stumped me for a while. I knew I wanted to use another layer of clay bricks to match the floor, although how to make individual bricks span the 24″ x 36″ area was the part that had me puzzled. My family will attest that I visited probably ten different Lowe’s, Home Depots and other oddball stores that weekend to get ideas and rule possibilities out. I didn’t want to get into adhering bricks with concrete so that was out; I toyed with supporting the bricks with rebar but all the drilling would have been nightmare; an iron slab would have worked but would have cost close to $80… I looked at concrete board, studied the gas grills and parts aisles, wandered through the building material sections, even poked around on three local construction sites for ideas.

I finally landed on the solution of using a thick steel tray that are used by garden centers to hold packs of plants which struck me while driving behind one of the shopping centers. Feeling guilty about just swiping one, I was fortunate to find an abandoned one behind a local Wal*Mart that had closed. Some ear shattering hacking was required to resize the piece, but the result served as a solid platform on which the layer of bricks could be set:

The front opening remained about the same as previous versions:

and I left a side opening to make managing the fire easier:

As the dark nature of some of the photos suggest, it was pretty late at night by the time I finished the construction so did not have a chance to actually see how it worked. Fortunately weekends roll around fairly frequently, so with nothing to build but the fire itself, I’ll be giving v2.0 a whirl tonight. Details on whether I’ll be working on v2.1 or scrapping everything for a v3.0 to come…