That’s right the next part involves doing the twist, in fact dusting off any of your 60s dance moves only makes the mix better, I promise! With your lovely sand dome nice and dry it’s time to build the first layer of your earth oven. But don’t use up all your energy at once there are two more after this!!

This layer forms the inside of your oven, it is the thermal mass layer, the opposite of the insulation layer underneath the tiles this layer absorbs as much heat from the fire as it can then slowly release it back into the space once the fire dies down to cook your pizza! The layer after this obviously is an insulation layer to stop the heat being released to the ether.

We could have researched ahead to see what materials we needed for the weekend. Instead we rose to a glorious morning ready to get stuck into the earth oven, only to discover the oven didn’t want any ordinary bricks for the oven floor, oh no, it needed fire brick tiles. We scolded it, so it knew it wasn’t allowed to be a high maintenance pet demanding a fresh coat of render to match the season! So a week went by and we procured some fire brick tiles, then it rained, for a week. The next week we realised that a chisel and hammer weren’t going to cut it, the fact that they were seconds with chips on them should have tipped us off that they like to crumble rather than cut neatly like a dream…time to call in some favours…

Well it would be as easy as the aforementioned pie if we actually sat down and read the book properly (the earth oven bible that is). Instead we took the attitude that one shouldn’t actually open to the pertinent page until a few minutes before getting started. Without fail we would discover that we didn’t have the right materials, tools or would need to let things soak or dry overnight or perhaps for a week, in light of this the only reasonable course of action remaining was to take a siesta or perhaps go fishing instead. This is perhaps not the most efficient way to get things done, but far less stressful.

We are now about 3/4 done on the oven and now that we know what to do, having more or less skimmed the relevant diagrams, I can promise you someone more prepared than us could easily knock this over in a week, with 5 out of the 7 days set aside for the oven to have some quality alone time to dry.

I encourage you to buy the book, but as a summary here are the first steps, with more to come (I promise, dear reader, that I won’t be as cavalier with my blog updates as my construction).