Make The Ultimate Pizza At Home With A DIY Brick Oven

Pizza stones (or unglazed ceramic tiles) give pizzas, breads and other baked items a marvellous crust. Use two layers of pizza stones or tiles and you can turn your stove into a brick oven of sorts.

Pizza picture from Shutterstock

A pizza stone distributes the heat evenly in your oven, and with the pizza on top of the stone, your homemade pizza will have a great crust. As Instructables user NHLavalanche shows, an upper layer helps trapeven more heat, browning the top of the pizza. Here are some tips if you’re using ceramic tiles instead of pizza stones:

You’ll need either two 12-inch pieces of unglazed ceramic quarry tile or eight pieces of six-inch tiles. Again: they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO BE UNGLAZED. I purchased mine several years ago from a very well known chain (big box) hardware store for 50 cents a piece.
 
We want to arrange the tile in the oven in two layers. The base layer will create the amazing crust we want, while the top will help increase the temperature within the pizza’s area by creating radiant heat from the stones above. It will also aid in getting a beautiful, lightly burned top crust.
 
Place the stones into the oven while it is cold and bring up to the highest temperature possible… 500 Degree F is mine. I let the over preheat for about 45 minutes to get the stones very hot.

While you probably won’t be able to achieve true brick oven temperatures with this method, a few dollars is all it takes to get more evenly baked, closer-to-perfection pizza and other baked goods.

Bonus: Hit up the link below for a homemade pizza recipe and other brick oven tips.

Pizza Margherita (and a $US5 DIY Brick Oven) [Instructables]