How to Build Your Own Cob Pizza Oven
Although you can quite easily cook your own crusty cob in your cob pizza oven, that’s not the type of cob we’re talking about here. Cob is an ancient building material made from subsoil, clay, water, and typically straw, and it just so happens to be the perfect material for building your own pizza oven.
You may not know this, but I’m a huge advocate of building your own oven. It’s one of the most rewarding and enjoyable experiences, and makes the pizzas you produce in your oven all the more tasty – knowing you not only made the pizza, but you made the thing you cooked it in too!
The great thing about building a cob pizza oven is that it’s easily mouldable – you build-up from a firebrick base and use a mound of sand to build over. And on the exterior part of the oven, you can really get creative! See below.
Related: Reviews of the top 7 best pizza ovens for the money
Now normally, I’d look to provide you with the necessary guide to build your own cob pizza oven, and off you can go to build it – but there’s a better way. Working with cob does take some skill and getting-used-to, and what better way to learn how to build your own cob pizza oven than to follow the masters?
Kate Edwards and Charlotte Eve from Cob Courses have built every structure imaginable from cob – they even built their own home from the stuff, and teach other people how to too!
Following 15 years of experience in building cob pizza ovens, Kate and Charlotte now offer 1-day workshops in Lyme Regis, UK, on the stunning Jurassic Coast, teaching you how to not only build your own cob pizza oven but how to cook in it too (plus dinner, cakes, and lots of other goodies are included in the day too!).
The course costs just £120 and by the end of the day you’ll have all the hands-on knowledge and experience you need to build your own cob pizza oven at home for next-to-nothing.
Here’s an overview of what the day involves:
Morning
- – Start the day with tea and coffee in the glorious hills just outside Lyme Regis
- – An overview of cob and why it’s such a great material to build with
- – Make your own cob and do the cob dance! And perform some tests to make sure the mixture is okay to build with
- – Learn how to light your own cob pizza oven
- – Build a sand ‘former’ for the cob pizza oven to be built over
Lunch
- – Pizza, of course! From a cob pizza oven ‘they made earlier’
- – Learn how to cook in a cob wood-fired oven
Afternoon
- – You’ll build your cob oven structure around the sand forming using a two-layer technique
- – Cut out the door to your oven, and pull out the sand
- – Cakes, tea, and coffee
- – Overview of the building process that you’ve just completed
As you can see it’s a day packed with fun activities and you’ll come away from it understanding how to build your own cob pizza oven, and also how to cook in it.
A truly enjoyable day-out that provides lasting skills – I just wanted to share this amazing experience with anyone else looking to build their own cob pizza oven.
