Poor Man’s Pizza Oven

A wood-fired pizza oven for the back yard, stacked from concrete pavers and bricks with no mortar at all. Sara and I built it in a January afternoon, lit a fire underneath, and had pizza the same day.

The idea

The design follows Easy Inexpensive Pizza Oven on Instructables: a firebox at the bottom, a paver laid across it as the oven floor, and a small brick chamber on top for the pizza. That build glues everything together with fire-resistant mortar. We skipped the mortar and just stacked the pieces, so the oven costs almost nothing, goes up in an afternoon, and comes apart again when we need the pavers back.

How we built it

1. Haul the materials. The whole oven is 30 concrete bricks and three 18×18 pavers, carried out to the yard in a garden wagon. Gloves help, because pavers are heavy and rough on the hands.
2. Lay a level pad. One 18×18 paver laid flat on the ground makes the base, with a few bricks in front as a hearth. Take the time to get it level, because with no mortar holding things together, every layer above depends on it.
3. Build the firebox. Bricks stood on edge around the base paver make three walls, leaving the front open for feeding wood and for air.
4. Lay the oven floor. The second 18×18 paver across the top of the firebox is the floor of the oven, and the fire heats it from below. Like the original design, we left a gap at the back, so heat and smoke rise past it into the chamber.
5. Stack the oven chamber. Bricks around the floor make the chamber walls, with the front left open. Leave the opening wide enough to slide a pizza in and out easily.
6. Close the roof. The third paver on top makes the roof, with a few bricks on it to hold everything in place.

Firing it up

Start a small fire of paper and kindling in the firebox, then feed in wood a little at a time until there's a good bed of red-hot coals. Give the oven floor time to heat through, about half an hour. We covered the oven floor with aluminum foil and dusted it with cornmeal so the pizza slides, then slid it in and turned it now and then. With a hot oven it's done in a few minutes.

Without mortar

Mortar makes the oven stiffer and holds heat a little better, but you don't need it. Without it, the oven is a weekend project with nothing to cure and nothing to break apart later. Concrete pavers aren't made for fire, so keep the fire moderate rather than roaring, and expect a paver to crack eventually. When one does, swap it out, which is the other advantage of not gluing anything.