Outdoor pizza ovens can provide an opportunity for you to enjoy delicious, authentic old-world style food.  Of course, most people love this amenity for the scrumptious pizza that it creates, but there are many other yummy foods that can be cooked inside the oven with mouth-watering results.  If you are one of the lucky ones that have an outdoor oven, you may be thinking to yourself “how do I care for my outdoor pizza oven?”  Well, we’ve got the answer to your question right here!

You’ll be happy to know that there is very little you have to do to keep your outdoor oven in tip-top shape.  In fact, since most ovens are built from extremely durable and sturdy materials, such as concrete, brick and stone, there is almost nothing you have to do to the exterior surfaces to keep them looking their best.  The only thing you may want to do is to periodically give them a good cleaning if dirt or grime start to build up on them.  This can be accomplished simply with a hose or a powerwasher.  If you opt to use a powerwasher, just take care to not dislodge any mortar between joints.

As for the inside of your wood-burning pizza oven, you’ll of course have to clean out the ashes periodically so they don’t build up.  The first thing you need to know about removing ashes from an outdoor oven is that you must  make sure they are completely cool and that there are no hidden embers still burning amongst the ash.  The importance of this cannot be stressed enough, since many a fire has been started from people who throw wood ashes that still contain hot embers into the trash.

There are two different ways that you can easily remove ashes from your wood oven dome.  The first method is to simply rake all of the ash into the center of the oven’s floor.  This is a good time, as you are moving the ashes, to spread them out a bit to make sure that there are no hot embers lurking around beneath the whitish-gray ash.  Once in a pile in the center of the dome, use your wood paddle to lift the pile of ash out of the oven, and once out, to place it into a bucket or trash container.  If there is a large pile of ash, you may have to repeat this step more than once.

If you prefer to sweep the ash directly into a trash container and don’t want to use your pizza paddle, then you can instead use a stiff broom or long-handled brush to sweep the ashes to the edge of the wood pizza oven and then have the container right at the edge to catch the ash as you sweep it right over the side into the bucket.  This method is more likely to result in ash winding up on the floor so take care to only move a smaller amount at a time so you can control the direction the ash moves.  It may be best to have two people handle this method – one to hold the bucket steadily in place and the other to control the sweeping of the ash out of the oven and into the bucket.

Whichever method you choose, you should find that it’s very easy to care for your outdoor pizza oven and to keep it clean.

For more information about pizza ovens or to discuss pizza oven design and installation with the professionals at Millenium Stoneworks, call 732-519-1112 or 347-723-6990.