Ninety seconds at four hundred and fifty degrees.
Backyard Oven Notes is about the small pizza oven on the patio: choosing one, lighting it without fear, making dough that can take the heat, launching without disaster, and turning a Friday into pizza night for eight.
Start with the first bake Skip to pizza night
Seven bakes, in firing order
From the unboxed oven to a full pizza night, one lesson per bake.
Choosing the first oven
Tabletop gas, wood pellet, or a brick dome you build: what each costs in money, patience and smoke, and which one we'd buy again.
The first fire
Lighting, the thirty-minute heat-up, reading the dome as it goes white, and the stone temperature that means go.
Dough for a hot oven
The one recipe that works at 450°C: hydration, the overnight fridge, ball size, and why bread-flour dough burns.
Launch and turn
The peel, the semolina, the flick of the wrist, and turning every twenty seconds so the crust doesn't go black on one side.
Toppings for fire
Less than you think, drier than you think: what survives ninety seconds and what turns the base to soup.
The cooling oven
After the pizzas: flatbreads, blistered vegetables and a loaf in the falling heat, so no fire is wasted.
The ninety-second rule
If a pizza takes longer than two minutes, the oven isn't hot enough — and no topping, dough or technique fixes a cool oven. Heat first, then everything else. Most first pizzas fail on the thermometer, not the recipe.
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