I imagine that I was not alone in coveting Jamie Oliver's Brick Oven that featured so heavily in his series Jamie At Home. So I did a bit of research to see what you might need to do to go about having one.The best place to start is "Your Brick Oven: Building It and Baking in It
" which is available from Amazon. The book's author Russell Jeavons has his own restaurant in South Australia which uses brick ovens. The book is divided into two sections. The first section is how to build an oven and the second section is recipes for dishes that you can make in your oven. These include bread, a variety of pizzas, roast chicken and Turkish lamb as well as a surprisingly wide range of desserts. (And who could resist a wood fired strudel?) The recipes are straight forward enough - but after reading this book I think it's fair to say that building your own oven is not. You will need to be determined and you will need to have some fairly decent skills as a builder (or at least the ability to pick up the skills as you go along). But if you do want to have a go then this book's detailed and systematic approach seems to pretty much cover everything and offers loads of little tips and ideas that the author has gained though experience.
My approach would be to hire a local builder who I would work with as I followed the plans in this book. It's also important that you make sure sure that you don't live in a smokeless zone and that you check out any other local by-laws.
As an alternative you could build yourself a mud oven -Build Your Own Earth Oven: A Low-Cost, Wood-Fired Mud Oven, Simple Sourdough Bread, Perfect Loaves
I have not got a clue what this book is like - but I thought the product description at Amazon by the author was brilliantly bonkers.Finally - you can buy wood stoves for cooking outdoors. Amazon has this PIZZA OVEN
for example.
