Building a Rock Pizza Oven! | Primitive Cooking at the off Grid Cabin

mama mia it's a pizza it's a pizza pie yeah this guy slides off my eyes ow this is ridiculous it's already burning the lid i can't see anything too much that was an ordeal all right let's close the lid [Music] so hey guys welcome back we're at the cabin in the woods again and today we are going to build a rock pizza oven or a bread oven or i don't know everybody want to call it maybe it's a maybe it's a chicken roasting oven so don how far are we digging we dig we're taking to china just about there we're not to china but we don't want to get to china so we've taken this first layer of topsoil off i guess it's the top layer it's the top soil so we've gone down about eight inches down to the clay base uh you don't want to build on top so because it tends to squish down and shift clay is very stable so we've digging down to the clay and that'll be our base so we're just gonna level that clay bottom out and we can start laying our first row of our first layer of rocks [Applause] [Music] while building the base of the pizza oven we ended up using larger stones that we had on site and my theory is is that the larger the stone the harder it is to push into the ground meaning the bottom will be heavier than the top the more surface area the less likelihood it's going to push itself into the ground we used four large stones on the corners of the pizza oven in order to stabilize it the best we could with what we had when setting the base we realized soon enough that the base needed to be flat in order to accommodate wood at further so i ended up finding a there's a two foot by two foot patio slab and it made the perfect base for the middle of the pizza oven it looks like there's words on it and it and it's got little holes it's kind of neat i don't know put that one aside when mixing up mortar the ideal consistency is that of peanut butter almost self-supporting so if you take it and put it into a clump it should stay like a clump it's mixed too thin it'll squish itself completely out of what you're setting the material setting so the heavier the material the thicker your mortar should be to support it if you mix your mortar too thin and then you place your stone or brick what happens is the mortar actually squishes itself out and you don't have enough mortar to bond one side of the stone to the other side of the stone so it's important to have the right consistency in the mortar we're always looking for the perfect stone it's always in the bottom so don what do you call that fancy pointing tool you're using fingers he's using his fingers to point so the idea behind this rubble foundation basically what we're building we put the motor in loose we stack the stone as best we can and when we take the mortar when it gets a little more solid what we do is we actually smooth it out you can use a pointing tool or in dawn's case you can use your fingers i recommend wearing gloves and probably thick rubber gloves uh because the the mortar does have some lime in it and some caustic stuff i guess that's the caustic stuff is the lime you don't want to get it on your fingers because it peels your skin off so yeah so what dawn's doing is basically smoothing out smoothing out making it look pretty it should be a little drier so we're just going to probably stack another couple of rows on it we can only go a certain height today because if you go too high it's just going to fall over so we want to a couple more rows get it to our our basically platform height and then let it set overnight and carry on building it higher see when mixing concrete it's best to hold the camera [Applause] stand away from the dust and hold the camera that's the best way to mix concrete this is the technical way of pointing it's been about a week since i since i built this base uh so i've been looking for a rock a large rock four by three i couldn't really find one that i realized to myself if i did find one i wouldn't probably be able to lift it what we're gonna do instead is i'm gonna build a rock so out of concrete i'm gonna form it up with some two by sixes all around add some rebar pour some concrete and that'll be our slab for our uh the next tier of the rock oven so we need to make a platform on top of it in order for the the actual pizza oven the business end of this thing to actually sit had i found a rock i probably would have used it i couldn't find a rock so uh now we're here we're gonna make a rock i'm gonna talk about a cool tool this is uh i've had this hanging on my tool belt for quite some time it's called a big lug and what it is it's basically a hook that dangles from your work your work belt and what it does is it allows you to hang your drill like this it's not a holster it's just a hook it's a genius hook it's patented it's a company called big lug it's amazing it's up if my local hardware store was you know words to carry these again i'd buy just have spare i had two i've got one it's uh it's a valuable tool to help you do your job because your drill is always at its ready it's just always sitting there just dangles it goes where you go so when you try to put screws in it's always behind you it's a great little tool whenever you're building with natural materials such as stone you can never really get it level so the plan here is to basically make a concrete form that's why i've got the 2x6 all the way around and then what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to make basically a basket to hold all the concrete now when you're making a basket up to the rock it's it's not going to be easy so i'm going to use little pieces kind of like this it basically attach them all to the underside of this structure in order to hold the concrete concrete it's like making a giant cake all our cake batter is going to fall out if we don't uh make sure we make a proper pan so we're going to make a proper pan hopefully our concrete doesn't all fall out hopefully this just collapse hopefully i have enough concrete there's lots of there's lots of this make a pan pour concrete i could taste the pizza already [Music] i added some tar paper on the base to fill in all little holes because we don't want our cake batter running out of our cake pan that'll bridge the gaps and hopefully the concrete doesn't ooze its way through i've also added some rebar from good measure i had some laying around so i'm going to throw that in and now we make the cake so i'm told you're supposed to tie your rebar together i'm not sure why i'm sure can somebody tell me why you tie your rebar together as long as it's in the concrete shouldn't it just be good they don't have the right tie wire but this is this is tie wire for construction with furring channel and stuff like that on drywall so i have a bunch of that laying around so what i'm gonna do is wire these guys all together i'm not sure why but i'm gonna do it [Applause] of course the rain would come right at the end so that's it for mr camera let's see if i can get this thing troweled out before i get wrecked i haven't met you the good part about having a cabin yet place you can go when it rains there's a real real rain delay the styrofoam on the uh on the pore so it doesn't get completely destroyed hopefully this rain doesn't last very long it's got to set up anyway so hang out with the cabin nice and dry cozy nothing like the sound of rain hitting the tin roof dog days dog days are raining anybody hey yeah so i figured now is a good time with any to talk about fire brick so i ended up acquiring these from an old stove wood stove that somebody was uh basically trading up so this was uh this was perfectly good fire brick i'm going to line the bottom above the concrete with fire brick in order to protect it from the intense heat of the actual fire that's going to sit on the bottom so this is this is the fire brick the dome is going to be made out of just stone i've done some research if you want to spend some money on fire brick yeah it's going to work better it's going to hold the heat it's going to refract the heat but if you don't at the very minimum do the base that's what we're going to do so i got a box of fire brick we're gonna do the base and we'll see how the rest of it lasts the rain has slowed down a little bit so i can get back out here glad my uh rain catchment system's all set up you guys should check that out if you didn't it works really really really well this allows me to actually have water in order to mix my concrete in order to build more things so it's a fundamental aspect of modern living i just got to screen it off meaning taking a board and sliding it back and forth along it to to flatten it out and then let it set up and then i'm going to trowel it out with a well my pool float ideally you would use a magnesium float i don't own one of those but that's what you're supposed to use this is that satisfying removing the forms it's like it's like baking a cake and then out of the oven and you flip it upside down it's all properly shaped the pan that's what concrete is to me it's like they get a cake so we got our cake nice rectangle cake concrete i think it turned out pretty good considering the rain and the lack of concrete i might have a little short debating on on using stone for the the upper half and and creating an arch and the whole dome system that has to be involved with making a pizza oven and then i thought to myself do i have something that's similar dimensions do i have a lot of them and i thought well i have a lot of rocks is it the ideal material to use no then i think do i have anything else and i think wait a second wait a second i think i know where there's a pile of bricks they're used bricks they're clay bricks it checks off the box i'm gonna go see if i have enough brick because i might make the inside of it bricks because it's probably they're all the same size should be easier to make arches with bricks have i ever built a pizza oven before no do i know what a pizza looks like yeah i've got a pretty good idea do i know where to start no so let's let's start by cleaning off some bricks laying some stuff out and see what it looks like because you got to start somewhere so i got to clean the bricks off and start laying out what i think the pizza oven should look like how big is a medium pizza ah 13 inches 13 inches of media pizza i don't know i just googled it google knows everything so anyways a uh medium pizza is 12 inches got eight slices this opening i have here is 13 inches so i should be able to squeak by it doesn't look very big because this thing's monster so i'm going to make it three bricks wide because that's what i have and uh you know what if uh just make more pizza i don't even have a big large opening you want to have a small opening to hold your heat in so i'm sure any good bricklayer could probably lay this without a form but i'm gonna i'm gonna make some plywood that oh maybe i'll make some plywood bend maybe some relief cuts in that will make it make it bend a little better oh come on that's not gonna work so if you're gonna fail fail quickly so i've been uh soaking this guy smoking this guy in the pond and you know what it made it stiffer i can even i can bend this one even less which is kind of weird so i might do a hybrid of this steel pipe this steel pipe for the door opening don showed up which is great because he can clean bricks say hi don hello after realizing there was no way i was going to be able to bend 3 8 plywood into an arch that tight i ended up using a piece of pine and cutting it in to a arch shape and then tacking on little bits of 2x3 in order to widen it in order to for the brick to have something to support itself to bricklaying 101 that's what we're learning anyways this is the first time dawn or i have ever attempted to do brick so we got the front i don't know if we could have done any bet well probably there's always room for improvement but it looks like it's it looks like it's an opening it looks like we can get a pizza in there don't just work it on the back wall let's have a look figure we got we cleaned off like a billion bricks and then we decided we're gonna do the whole thing at a rock except the back wall and the front door dawn's just putting together the back wall here bricklaying 101 we've never laid bricks before might as well start now this is a perfect place to lay bricks when we excavated for the pond we have a big pile of rocks so now we're looking for some keystone dawn's already looking he ran down here so excited to get the keystone so hopefully he's oh look he's got a rock you got a rock done here's one keystone look at that that's beautiful should we wash it look at look at that's how i carry the camera carry the camera so you don't have to carry the rock so yeah we're looking we're looking for some you can see all the rock we have to choose from dawn's an expert on this remember when you saw him build the root cellar and he was okay look at them all we should have brought the wheelbarrow um how about i put the camera down and give dawn a hand because i feel silly just letting him move rocks those are the ones we fished out of the thing with all four corners it's gonna allow us to start somewhere so when you're working with mortar you always want to have a pair of gloves dawn's got some rubber gloves on i've got these uh these leather gloves and the best kind of gloves are free ones and my buddy my buddy mark left these left these behind he didn't think i was gonna be using it for concrete so he's watching this surprise i'm using your gloves ever done research after you purchase something do you think hey let's let's go do some research because like buyer's remorse i was doing some research on brick oven or rock oven and what they said if you're gonna use rock was to fire the rock beforehand in sort of a fire pit and the ones that don't explode use for your rock oven we didn't do that we just kind of had a bunch of rock and we started making a brick oven we're going to find out if our pizza oven is going to explode hopefully it doesn't explode i guess i'll learn right learn a lesson that i have exploding pizza or so dawn got an early start i i think he slept in the woods last night so he was here before me and he actually started mixing and going he's a he's highly motivated sleep with the woods last night oh no no i slept uh slept in my own bed but the the plan now is to uh basically work from both sides and work our way up to the middle and then enclose the chimney this is our chimney here it's sold uh it's from our uh evaporator build if you don't if you can check that out over the wooded beers of its channel we did a uh maple syrup evaporator and this is this is the chimney fort so we'll have to get another chimney or actually you know what let's build the proper evaporator this year let's add that to the list okay so we're gonna stack some stone we're gonna speed that process up through the magic of film you're gonna see progress in any luck we'll be eating eating soon pizza mmm pizza when i started the day i thought you know what i'm not gonna have a mortar so i told dawn i said on his way in can he pick up some more mortar and sure enough we had just enough mortar we didn't even touch the stuff he brought that's that usual usually it's better to have it not need it than needed not have it but now we got three extra bags but uh have a look at this this is this is what's left nothing that's impressive we didn't actually over mix anything so now all we have to do is wait for this to dry up and then we brush out the joints does anybody else feel like filling this thing with baking soda and add his vinegar because i think we just built a volcano then you could light it on fire and cook a pizza it would be like a volcano like true volcano it's a volcano oven it's not a pizza oven volcano oven yeah doesn't look angelic there with backlit it's pretty i like it so finishing up the detail work of the pizza oven we've loosely placed all of the bricks in place and i don't know if you can see closely but so the mortar is in between the rocks in order to get a nice smooth finish you have to leave it a little wild it's been a couple of hours relative humidity is is pretty high so the stuff hasn't been drying that well and what i do is i come back with a brush in order to leave a nice smooth finish now this is a this isn't hard to do and a lot of people overlook it they think when they when they do it they're like geez i'm not very good at this well in reality people wait that do it they wait until it's a little bit dry and then they tool it out that's that's often overlooked when when doing any sort of concrete work mortar work pointing brick work hello hello anybody hope so the next day we're here everything's dry doesn't this look like the chosen rock it's got like a little shrine hopefully the rocks are placed in a fashion that they're self-supporting they've wedged in there their mortars dried up take the forms off hopefully it doesn't clap i got some other stuff to do i got to put mantle here and take this form out i guess i could burn the wood out because we'll see what happens it's not like it's collapsing but i think it should firm up a little bit now that i've got some air flow into there and i got that styrofoam out i think it'll give it some time to to stiffen up i don't want to i don't want to wreck what i've done so i'm going to give that a day but you guys could probably get to watch it right now since i'm waiting for this thing to draw anyways i might as well make it look pretty so i went up to the middle and grabbed a uh an offcut from a cedar that was when we were making the hobbit house if you haven't seen the hobbit house you should go check it out it's pretty cool anyways this was a cut from just the basically the face of a log i was just laying around so what i was thinking just like that cover up the rough edge of the log i'm going to secure the front with a couple of uh tapcon screws so these are designed to go into concrete so you drill them you do a pilot hole the concrete bit drill into the concrete and you just screw it in like you'd normally screw these are expensive so if you ever see them around and they're cheap pick them up you never know when you need to screw some concrete i had to be patient on this one i really wanted to take the support structure down the other day but i've waited a couple days the mortar has set up considerably like you can see this this is harder to break apart like you can't really break it apart well you can but it's it's not like just sand sitting in place so i hope this doesn't collapse this is the inside of the pizza oven it's exciting so this stuff here is uh is what was holding it up during uh during the build you can see a little bit of mortar sticking out um you can see the screws right i attach it to the insulation so i'm going to take this out um it is an arch it's it's most likely self-supporting it's just a question of uh has it dried enough and what it looks like after you take the support out that's hard to come out it's like a brick oven or something i'm just chipping off some of the loose border that spilled out over the edge because i've got to make another door i love bacon doors [Applause] the next stage of the game generally i think is uh it's called refractory cement and what it's done is it usually pars the inside of the i guess the the oven the pizza oven and that allows the it protects the mortar that's there protects the the brick it's a refractory cement and it reflects heat back down to the pizza i'm not sure we're gonna have that issue with this guy so uh i'm gonna skip that step but again this is not a how-to this is what i'm doing so if you're building a pizza oven and you want it to last a thousand years probably use the refractory cement parts the inside of it i might visit that at a later date on this one i'm not going to do it i'm going to line the bottom fire brick this allows a place for the pizza well the pizza surface also it allows the heat the intense heat from the fire that's lit inside the pizza oven to be lifted off the concrete lighting a fire on concrete's not a great idea so this is specially designed fire brick from an old stove repurposed to be the floor of this pizza oven tails for the pizza oven this is what it looks like inside the pizza oven this is kind of cool i could see why people would make a house out of rock and mortar so i've got the fire brick all laid out um it looks like it fits pretty good so now i guess what what's what's next is uh we need a door and um later up let's just like i think i think if we light a little fire it'll dry it out a little bit more it feels very moist in here but it is it is quite warm outside and this uh this thing has a lot of mass so i think if we light it up it'll it'll uh it'll make it it'll dry it out or it'll explode now that we got the door template figured out i'm going to take this transfer to a thicker piece of wood and i'm going to cut it out and the reason why is to keep the heat in the door once you light your fire you put the door on it keeps the heat in makes it look pretty keeps the critters out there's lots of reason for the door and we haven't had enough chainsaw on this build so i'm gonna add a little chainsaw make a door button this guy up [Applause] [Music] it's a door the crowning touch this is the cap off of an old oil fired furnace it was on the roof of somebody's house and they were throwing it out and i said fat pig is pretty it's stainless steel you don't find them stainless steel very often so when you do you hang on to them even if you don't have an immediate use for them i hang onto chimney caps because they're expensive and you never know when you're gonna need a chimney cap i was told to make it to 500 degrees in order to properly cook a pizza how much wood is that that's probably enough i built the paddle for the pizza oven out of some butternut i had laying around it was nice and dry i used the approximate measurements of the front of the door being about 13 inches so i made the paddle 12 inches and about 4 feet long i ended up sanding it down and using a natural oil called nature oil and it's designed for butcher blocks cutting boards salad bowls wood handles toys it basically prevents drying like drying out of the wood it coats it it protects it it makes it somewhat waterproof so yeah it's a company called circa 1850 and they make butcher block preservative and it's the same thing that i would use on a countertop or a butcher block did you know that you can go to your local favorite pizza place and generally ask nicely for some dough and some toppings i'm sure they'll gladly sell you dough and pepperoni and cheese and whatever other toppings you want i made a basically a pepperoni pizza i used pepperoni i had some mozzarella cheese i used the dough and there's special sauce this pizza is just dynamite it's it's [Music] delicious hopefully this guy slides off my eyes terrible i gotta get those pepperonis off there it's gonna vaporize them wow this is ridiculous it's already burning the lid i can't see anything oh i think we need too much oh that wasn't ordeal all right let's close the lid this is why you should always leave the cooking to the professionals so we leave that in there for set the timer 10 minutes all right i'm gonna check that in about five repositioning my pepperoni that's been in there for like friggin minute those are just that was a little bit a little bit more than all dante let's just turn this thing oh there we go there we go i'll give that another 30 seconds like that's insane that's got to be i don't know that's pretty hot pepperoni it's still cooking i'm going to give it a couple a couple more minutes it's got it it's like it's like it's been in there for four minutes like you almost could you almost like shoot this real time like it's insane i think that's uh that's a good pizza pie [Applause] tell it's a little burnt on the one side but uh it looks like look at the underside it looks pretty good i'd say that's a success with a pizza it's uh it's well done it took actual real time four minutes to cook the pizza from not cooked to almost burnt there's probably a learning curve i am not a chef i am a builder so we're just cooking some fish just uh because we got the coal bed all set up so the oven's all set up prep so you can just cook one thing after the other after the other after the other and uh yeah so this this is this is some delicious pizza it was well worth the effort actually so it's delicious yeah nice crispy crust that's my first time ever cooking a pizza in the uh in a rock oven it might be actually my first time cooking pizza ever but uh that's good well i'm gonna finish my pizza i hope you guys enjoyed watching me build this pizza oven i know i enjoyed making it join me on the next one

Channel: Modern Self Reliance

Views: 1,017,103

Rating: 4.8067679 out of 5

Keywords: rock oven, stone oven, pizza oven, bread oven, cob oven, clay oven, primitive oven, how to build a stone oven, stoven oven pizza, stove oven bread, stove oven construction, stove oven plans, building, tools, handtools, saw, mortar, masonry, cooking in stone oven, stone oven location, outdoor stone oven, mixing concrete, build project, stone oven design, off grid cabin, cabin in the woods, self reliance, primitive cooking, off grid, cabin

Id: DWYuWTzRQMs

Length: 31min 16sec (1876 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020