Outdoor Wood-Fired Pizza Oven
Come watch me build an outdoor kitchen that will hold my heavy-duty wood-fired pizza oven! Be sure to scroll down to the video below to catch my bonus cooking tips for success!
I built an outdoor kitchen, garden, and farmhouse table to have farm-to-table dinners with my friends and family on my homestead in Seattle, but finished the project just a week before I found out we were moving across the country!
So, this was my chance to do it all again. I have my mind set on building another tiny house someday, and I figured building a new outdoor cooking area would be a great project to practice some new woodworking skills.
Why I Love Wood Fired Ovens
An outdoor kitchen on our homestead is a must because outdoor cooking has always been one of my very favorite things. Wood-fired cooking is an incredible way to move towards off-grid living and sustainability.
There is so much more to a wood-fired oven than cooked pizza (although wood-fired pizza could be reason enough!) I used my wood-fired oven in Seattle to cook steaks, bake homemade apple pies, bread, and cookies, cook fish, roast veggies, and so much more.
The Best Structure for Outdoor Wood Fired Ovens
This authentic wood-fired oven weighs almost a ton, so the structure had to be incredibly strong, making a timber frame pergola a perfect solution. My friend Greg Pennington used his sawmill to help me dimension the rough sawn sassafras lumber we needed for this project.
Timber frame construction requires far less accuracy and precision than fine woodworking, so this is a great way to learn how to build incredibly sturdy structures with fairly inexpensive building materials.
This woodworking project is an easy way to learn basic woodworking joinery like mortise and tenon joints, half laps, and drawbored/pegged joints. Additionally, timber framing requires minimal equipment. We were able to able to cut the joinery and put it all together with the following tools:
Installing an Outdoor Woodfired Oven
After the pergola was complete, figuring out how to install the nearly one-ton pizza oven off of its shipping pallet was the next challenge.
In my last oven install, my tractor wasn’t quite strong enough, and my buddy, Clint, graciously trailered his tractor over to help me out. This time, my friend, Daniel, came to the rescue with an incredible amount of skill to do the heavy lifting with his skid steer.
Wood-Fired Cooking Tips
When making pizza, use a ton of flour on the bottom of the crust. It helps enormously when it comes to sliding the pizza on and off the peel (learn how to make a pizza peel here)
Preheating these ovens can take some time, but you can save about 25 minutes in heat up time if you use a torch.
Temperature control can be tricky, and cook times will vary. Never walk away from the oven. With such high temperatures, your stuff cooks FAST in there. I’ve never made 6-minute cinnamon rolls in a regular oven before, but there you have it.
When cooking steak, I pre-heated the pan on the cooktop before adding the steaks and putting it all in the oven. I don’t know if that’s a necessary step, but it gave me peace of mind.
If you want to make a pergola or project like this of your own, step-by-step visuals, cut lists and clickable links to all materials are available here.
Although we used rough-sawn lumber, these plans are formulated to use dimensional lumber from a big box store. This basic shed design can be used as a garden pergola, a woodshed, or even a place to store your lawnmower. It’s a great weekend project that will last a really, really long time.