Post by downunderdave on Apr 30, 2020 20:43:55 GMT
How time flies! Not sure where all my pictures have gone, the are all still in the same location on my hosting provider and if I copy and paste a link into a new window they are visible?
Anyway the oven barely got used last year with the weather being so crappy, but because I hadn't finished the roof it sat under a tarp for most of the summer and all through the winter. The good thing about that is that when I can to fire it up the other week it was lovely and dry and required no drying out fires at all - which I was super pleased about.
I ended up with a semi dome of vermicrete and a significantly bigger chimney (which works wonderfully!), there is a cement render over most of the vermicrete and I have some rend-x to apply as a waterproofing finish next time we get some decent weather.
However having cooked pizza the last two weekends I think I have a problem with my internal dome height, the bottom of my pizza is cooking much faster than the top, the height at the apex of my dome is 530mm, my arch is 300mm high by 450mm wide. the floor size is 0.635m2 (or 115cm deep by 57cm wide) does anyone have any thoughts on that?
It sounds to me like your barrel arch is too high and therefore too far away from the pizza top. The usual hemisphere has its internal height half of the diameter. Neopolitan ovens have a lower dome than this in an effort to get the dome closer to the pizza top. In your case your internal height is 530 but diameter 570, that’s really quite high. A little trick you can try, before making drastic design changes, is to lift your pizza up with the peel so it is close to the roof of the oven. Also it is imperative to maintain a fire (flame) on the side or the back of the oven when cooking pizza. The floor is always a bit too hot for the first and second pizzas. Just pull them closer to the entry where the floor is a little cooler. You could raise the floor by putting in another layer of bricks, but you’d need toiinsulate under them or your floor will end up too thick. Alternatively your existing floor bricks may be removable, depending how you built. You could then build up more insulation over the existing insulation and replace the floor bricks.