Even More Progress on the Tile

Here is yet another photo of my Vesuvio oven being built by Forno Bravo (thanks to them for the pictures!). Click for a larger view of the tile and their progress.... they still need to cut out tile to place my Texas star and they front of the opening area needs done still.

Tile Being Placed on the Oven

Here is another photo of my Vesuvio oven being built by Forno Bravo (thanks to them for the pictures!). Click for a larger view of the tile being placed:

The Oven is Taking Shape!

Here are some more photos of my Vesuvio oven being built by Forno Bravo (thanks to them for the pictures!). Click for a larger view.

The Oven is Taking Shape!

Here's the latest in-progress photo from Forno Bravo about the oven they are building for me. The guts of it are taking shape. That looks like wood framing that's used to pour concrete or something for the chimney that curves from the front of the oven back to the top for the center chimney.

This is the cross section design of the oven (via this PDF):

Knowing that the inner dome has to be solid for heat and flame reflection, I always wondered how these ovens have a central vent. This is how... the air goes out the front and gets routed up across the top of the inner dome to the chimney.

Awesome!

First "Baby" Picture of the New Oven

Forno Bravo has started work on our oven.

Here's the first "in progress" photo they shared with me. It's sorta like seeing a baby in the womb?

The four brown pieces are the floor of the oven. The interior dimensions will be 40" x 48" or 1,256 square inches, perfect for cooking a few pizzas at a time.

The round base underneath will support the oven dome.

Thanks to them for sharing the photos. More to come as things progress there in California and, eventually, on site here in Texas.

Tile & Color Options for the New Pizza Oven

Forno Bravo has been very helpful and collaborative in terms of helping me think about oven designs.

They pointed me to a local Daltile store to see the color options we could work with:

It really helps to see the tiles in person rather than online. By the way, the line of tile is called ISIS. Oops.

We wanted to go with a Texas theme... with red, white, and blue colors. But, we didn't want the whole oven to be really bright in color.

We thought we could do a Texas-style star, which the FB tile designer mocked up for us, using different base background colors and different stripe colors:

While FB was working on the detailed view, I had somebody do some photoshop mockups of different color and stripe options:

We decided to go with the bottom design... dark grey tile with red stripes and a blue arch. I've crudely pasted in the Texas star design... it will look better for real.

The Forno Bravo designer suggested removing the one red stripe that would be interrupted by the star, so we took their suggestion.

Real photos to come!

Getting Started with My Second Oven!

My last post here was almost four years ago...  about leaving my oven behind, as my wife got transferred to San Antonio. We've now moved back to the DFW area and we're again in a house where we can do another wood burning pizza oven.

In San Antonio, we were in a high-rise condo building, which was great, except that we couldn't put in another oven. Thankfully, we enjoyed two great VPN-style pizzerias: Dough and Braza Brava to get our pizza fix.

But now, we have a back yard... and control over that yard. I'm fortunate that I'm not having to fight to do an oven. My wife is totally on board with the idea... she'd be upset if I did NOT do an oven, so again, I'm lucky.

Last time, we did a Forno Bravo Artigiano oven and we loved it. It was hand-built in Italy before being brought to California by FB. I had chosen FB at the recommendation of Jay Jerrier, who had an FB oven in his backyard -- and this was before he had the Cane Rosso pizza truck that led to his growing pizzeria empire.

My original oven - see the beautiful brick dome interior:

This time, we are still going with Forno Bravo, but in a different direction. With the Artiagiano, we basically got a dome, four floor pieces, some metal chimney and cap, and a door. The whole upper structure needed to be insulated and built around the core oven. This took time and my contractors screwed up a number of things that required rework. You can scroll through older blog posts to see those stories.

Here are posts about the first try, which got stopped before they were done.

Here are posts about the second attempt, which ended badly when the wood framing used the contractors (against the instructions of FB) caught fire. The third time was the charm...

We decided to go with the Forno Bravo Vesuvio oven.

Pros:

• It ships as a single piece, fully assembled
• It installs easily on top of a hearth/base that we're going to have a contractor build
• Slightly less to buy the fully assembled oven than it would have been to pay the contractor more to insulate and build the upper structure

Cons:

• Lacks the romance of having been hand-built in Italy

All things considered, the pros outweigh the cons. It should perform as well as the Artigiano and it's about the same size -- great for having large pizza parties.

Here is a standard picture of a Vesuvio from FB:

This shows the metal stand option. We're going to have a stone base built for it.

See more pictures here that show some of the variety of tiles and colors they can do.

In future posts, I'm going to give sort of the play-by-play of how this goes.

I placed the order with FB on Monday. They quote a 21-day lead time, plus shipping (about another week). 

I hope you enjoy following the progress.