Brick Oven - v3.0

After the disappointing flop of v2.0, I started thinking about whether or not I was designing the oven in the wrong direction. Instead of building it with a larger footprint and flater, would I be better in building it with a smaller footprint and taller? Heat rises after all, so the notion popped into my head that perhaps I would be better off coming up with a structure that took advantage of the fact that the hottest part of the oven was always at the top.

A well timed visit from my parents who currently reside in Italy breathed new life into the brick oven project. They shared a story of their visit to a sagra where they enjoyed food that had been baked in a brick oven which had a very simiular sounding design - a firebox in a lower chamber heated up an upper chamber where the food was baked. A few sketches later, v3.0 was underway.

The lower portion of the oven stayed fairly similar to the previous version, only with one layer higher (to accomodate the coals and fire better) and only the side opening:

The upper portion was in essence stacked on top of the lower portion, with openings left on each side of the floor to let the heat from the fire below rise up:

The end result was a little unusual in appearance, but structurally worked out well once my dad and I figured out how to position the bricks to make everything fit together (it’s handy having an architect as a father!):

The results were reasonably successful. The lower chamber was a perfect size and made it much easier to start and manage a good fire:

The upper portion also hit a significantly higher temperature than any previous version - just shy of 500 degrees:

v3.0 still had its issues, though. For one, I found that I ended up with the same problem I ran into in v1.1 - the food inherited some funky flavors because it was in the flow of smoke, fumes and ash. More important was the realization that with the design the way it was, I had in essence built the equivilant of a regular oven… only one that cooked the food with funky flavors and required a much greater degree of effort than pushing a few buttons as is the case with my regular oven. Without the food having any direct exposure to the fire and/or coals itself, I lost the ability to accomplish the key touch of flavor I was seeking in the first place.

Realizing this before the fire had gone out, I had just enough room to squeeze one of the pizzas through the side opening on the lower chamber and charred the edges slightly which resulted in a pizza that was almost the way I had envisioned it:

Microsoft software tester Michael Hunter wrote in a blog post that “learning doesn’t happen from failure itself but rather from analyzing the failure, making a change, and then trying again.” With a few versions of the oven under my belt, each with their issues, I seemed to be heading closer and closer to the design I was looking for, and still at a cost that was under about $30.