Italian Brick Oven

Brick ovens are as commonplace in Italy as microwaves are in the United States, but now there’s a greater interest in using both indoor and outdoor Italian brick ovens worldwide to cook pizzas, breads, and other fare.

While variations of brick ovens can be seen throughout history via the excavations of ancient civilization sites, the brick oven gained a strong following in Italy during the Roman Empire. There have been over 30 brick ovens discovered in the ruins of Pompeii, and these were built using assorted bricks and ceramic materials. It’s likely that the ovens were used for residential and commercial applications, especially for rustic pizza, and smaller ovens were probably used to feed one or two families at a time.

Generally, Italian ovens are rounded in shape, with the ceiling arched over the oven floor. In oven construction, less concrete is needed to hold the oven together because the round dome is self-standing. Basic low vault oven dimensions have an interior chamber diameter of 36 inches and a height of 17 inches, with an opening width of 18.5 inches and a height of 10 inches.

Even though the oven seems ready to use after installation, it’s important to cure the cooking chamber with a succession of about seven fires that increase in size before any large fires are built. Immediately doing the latter could damage the oven or prevent it from heating up or cooking foods properly.

Forno Bravo, a pizza oven manufacturer in Northern California, purports that rounded oven designs heat up faster, at less than one hour, compared to the two or three hours it takes to preheat a barrel vault oven. This makes regularly using the oven more manageable. Also, since round Italian ovens burn less wood than barrel vaults, this saves the user from having to spend more money on wood.

Cooking with a live fire utilizes reflected heat from the heat source, conductive heat stored in the oven floor, and convection created because of the dome shape that allows the air to come into the oven, heat, and circulate evenly around the food. A round oven is ideal for cooking with a steady fire, especially for pizzas, because there’s more usable space to keep the heat source on one side and the food on the other. There are fewer cold spots, too, unlike a barrel vault that has hot and cool spots depending on where the fire is located.

Using coals to heat Italian brick ovens works for dishes that don’t need the extremely hot temperatures that a live wood fire provides. For bread and other dishes that bake at traditional oven temperatures, the heat source should be raked from the oven and the door closed to moderate the heat.