The Italians may be considered the founding fathers of pizza, but it was a tarte flambée, consumed in the tiny village of Barr in the Alsace region of France, that convinced me I had to build my own wood fired oven.

On my return from France, I tried to replicate that small crisp slice of bread dough, topped with grilled cheese, onion and bacon, in our gas oven. It could not be done. I got a cheese and bacon pizza instead. Only now, five years, three hundred house bricks and half a tonne of concrete later, can I finally say that I have recreated something close to that simple slice of Alsatian cuisine. And it was worth every minute.

The wood fired oven, my WFO. She takes over three hours to fire, but when she is hot, she’s really hot. Our pizzas take a couple of minutes to cook to perfection. We wait, by the oven door, and watch the oil from the cheese bubble instantly to life. The edges of the dough rise and curl and brown. My son calls the bubbles in the crust “little turtles”. A couple of deft moves with the peel—the flat piece of stainless steel I attached to an old broom handle—and the pizzas are rotated. You can smell them. Watching them cook is half the enjoyment.

So how did I get here?

First, I planned the site. It had to be close enough to the house to be able to carry the pizzas to and fro, but far enough away to not drown us in smoke. This planning phase took, well, almost four years. I did a lot of thinking.

When my wife gave me a copy of The Bread Builders, a book written by expatriate Aussie turned US oven guru, Alan Scott, about building an oven to bake your own naturally leavened breads, the project really took off. After six months of persevering with sourdough starters, linen, humidifiers and razor blades (for the bread, not me), I was finally making a consistent enough loaf to be edible. I could delay no longer. The WFO was calling.

A mate and I laid a slab with a borrowed concrete mixer. I bought the old house bricks from a recycled building supplies store. We already had a few left over mud bricks from the house extension a few years before. A few bags of cement, a trailer load of sand and the oven started to go up. Following Alan Scott’s recipe, we substituted the concrete bricks with our muddies for the base structure.

We poured another slab as a hearth, using some steel reo bars to support its weight. We laid bricks upon the hearth slab and started on the dome roof. I thought this would be the tricky bit, but using simple plywood template, the bricks slotted together easily.

Before this project, I had never laid a brick in my life, nor used any concrete other than bags of quickset to fix a few posts. I become infatuated. I eagerly waited for each stage to dry so I could get started on the next stage. I spent every weekend for a month finishing my project. Even the kids caught the bug and started helping me. Together, we admired her as she took shape. I felt like a stonemason. A craftsman. I felt like I was building a castle.

Alan Scott ovens are perfectly designed for baking bread and pizza. They are retained heat ovens, which means you make a big fire in the oven and all the masonry bulk you have built up in the walls retains enough heat to bake your food after you take the fire out. For pizzas, however, which cook in minutes you keep a small fire inside the oven to grill the top with reflected heat.

You do not need a great amount of retained heat for pizza. An off the shelf, DIY kit, might suffice, but for the same price and a little extra work you can build yourself a magnificent Alan Scott oven that will bake for four or five hours when properly fired.

Lila Scott, Alan’s daughter and heir to the great man’s knowledge, says the record for one of their ovens is twenty five consecutive bakes from the one firing. This needs wood, of course. On our farm, with lots of bush, wood is not a problem, but it is worth considering if you do not have access to an affordable supply.

The pay off for us is triple fold. The first reward is gastronomic. The food tastes incredible. Food baked in a WFO is moist on the inside, crisp on the outside. Lila Scott says the magic of a retained heat oven is “you can cook a turkey at 700 degrees Fahrenheit (370°C) without basting and it comes out perfect every time.” The oven bakes hot, but slowly and it is forgiving on most cuts of meat. The bread is incomparable. I do not know why. Maybe it is all in my head, but when the loaves come out of the WFO, I am consumed with a deep warmth; there is something real, tangible and ancient about the whole process. Slow food taken to another level.
 
The second reward is social. We love standing in the warm glow of the oven watching the flames flicker and the food cook. It is campfire cooking raised to culinary art.

There are ledges designed especially for wine glasses on my oven and I have screwed an iron beer top remover to its wall. Our friends and neighbours love the WFO. It is a heater, kitchen and conversation piece all in one. Pizza night at our place has become well known in the neighbourhood.

The third reward is personal. Sometimes I stand by the window and just stare at her, my WFO, my four de pain, my mistress. I built her. I brought her into this world and now she pays me back in tarte flambée. I could be in Alsace. Or Italy. But I am right here, home sweet home.

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