May 22nd, 2024
Build Your Own Pizza Oven Through A Tuscan-Do Approach
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If you can’t head off to Italy this year, you simply have to bring the tastes of the Mediterranean to your own home and what could be better than a tasty wood fired pizza, bubbling with cheese and with a beautifully charred base worthy of any pizzeria in Naples? Maybe a pizza – or even better, another recipe concoction, rustled up in your own garden oven?
But how do you top that? Maybe by serving up that pizza from an oven you’ve built yourself, so it comes with a big topping of self-satisfaction?
Jane Hunt interviews Andrew Manciocchi, the Anglo-Italian and managing director of Orchard Ovens, who first introduced the concept of woodfired pizza ovens to the UK in 2003, to get to the bottom of what’s involved with building your own pizza oven. Having helped homeowners incorporate ovens into garden designs not just in the UK but beyond, Andrew has a wealth of knowledge to impart.
So how much time do you need to allow for a DIY pizza oven project? Is it a two-person job? What are the first steps, if you want to be poodling around your garden, living life as if in La Bella Italia … or as Gwyneth Paltrow, Jamie Oliver, or other Valoriani celeb customers who’ve been furnished with pizza ovens by Orchard Ovens?
Jane learns all from her Catapult PR client and discovers how homeowners can get their DIY skills into full swing and have a glorious self-built pizza oven in their own garden or back yard, potentially in time for the 2024 Euros, if they buy themselves a Valoriani pizza oven kit and adopt a Tuscan-do attitude. With these Valoriani ovens available not just in the UK, it’s something that anyone in Europe, the USA – or in other countries – could do.
Jane discovers how many DIY talents you might need for the project, how the kit concept works and how not to get the whole project wrong, by buying the wrong self-assembly pizza oven kit in the first place.
Tips are provided as to where to situate the oven and avoid regular pitfalls that many of those building their own pizza oven encounter. Jane also discovers what help is available to UK buyers and what sorts of dishes, beyond pizza, could be cooked outdoors – including those she has managed in her own pizza oven!
But if DIY isn’t your thing but you desperately want the lifestyle benefits of cooking and entertaining outdoors, Jane and Andrew discuss what the other woodfired pizza oven options might be, for those who are not that handy with bricks, mortar and render but who want to have the ultimate garden party catering option. With these Valoriani ovens also being available worldwide, it can inspire anyone.
With a Coldplay Chris Martin story thrown in, and Jane explaining how she finds cooking in her own oven and who she’d most like to serve up a wood-fired treat to, in her dreams, at a pizza party – with Axl Rose top of the guest list, of course, there’s lots to digest.
