How to Build a Simple Wood-Fired Oven

Wood-fired ovens used to be a staple in every home, where families could cook delicious meals, warm their houses, and heat water for the washing basin. Today, it is possible to find modern, high quality cast iron wood stoves that can function as an alternative heating method for your home. However, those large cast-iron centerpieces where families cooked every meal are today mostly relics in antique stores. 

Making a wood-fired oven is a fast and relatively simple DIY home project that can be completed in a few weekends, even if you aren’t an accomplished mason or builder. 

Why Do You Need a Wood-Fired Oven?

Perhaps the better question is: Why don’t you? Most of us probably don’t have a lot of experience cooking with wood. If you have ever tasted a wood-fired pizza, however, you probably understand that cooking with wood offers a different taste and can expand the culinary possibilities of even a novice cook. 

Wood-fired ovens can be beautiful, artistic creations that can bring life to an otherwise dull and ordinary outdoor patio. A wood-fired oven can transform outdoor patios and gardens, extend your kitchen and dining area, and allow you to take advantage of outdoor spaces even during the winter.

Of course, wood-fired ovens also offer warmth. Its heat can warm an attached sunroom or provide ambient heating for outdoor areas during colder months. 

Wood-fired ovens are fun, inexpensive, and relatively easy to build. Below, we will look at three different possibilities to create an economical, practical, and aesthetically pleasing wood-fired oven for your home.

The Sustainability of Cooking with Wood 

In the United States, about three out of every four households own a grill or smoker, but almost nobody relies on wood for their primary cooking needs. While our grandmother's generation might have continued the practice of cutting firewood early in the morning to have fuel for the day's meals, today, the vast majority of households cook with either natural gas (40 percent of households) or electricity.

Cooking every meal with wood does have its drawbacks. For starters, the process of starting up a fire every time you want to heat water for a quick coffee will most likely not fit with our hectic schedules. But cooking with wood does still offer certain sustainability benefits.

Cooking with wood is often associated with pollution, mostly because homeowners can physically see the smoke rising from the burning wood. While thousands of households in a dense urban area, all cooking with wood could cause dangerous problems with urban air pollution, natural gas stoves and ovens are also responsible for enormous methane emissions. Though less visible, these methane emissions are a significant contributor to global climate change and are another reason that homeowners should consider transitioning to an all-electric home.

Whether for home heating for cooking purposes (or for both simultaneously—an added advantage), Burning wood is essentially a carbon-neutral solution. The growth of the trees initially captured the carbon released during the burning of the wood. If those trees grew in degenerated environments, much of the carbon would most likely accumulate in the soil by increasing soil organic matter and soil organic carbon. That means that burning wood for fuel might even be carbon positive. An electric range powered by a carbon zero home cannot claim the same, as solar panels come with a sizeable embodied energy footprint. 

A Few Different Wood-Fired Oven Options

Whether you want to find a cooking solution that will help you reduce your carbon footprint or want to try your hand at baking a wood-fired pizza, we offer three simple step-by-step guides for building three different types of wood-fired ovens.