Installation guide

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Pompeii Oven Instructions

Why Build a Pompeii Brick Oven

Instead of a Barrel Vault Oven

1. The Pompeii Oven design heats up much more

quickly than a barrel vault oven -- less than an hour,

compared with 2-3 hours or more for the heavier

oven. The round dome is self-standing (ala the

Duomo in Florence), so it does not need concrete

cladding to hold it together. Because the barrel vault

has a great deal of outward thrust, it needs a lot of

concrete for buttressing. As a result, the round oven

can be much thinner; 2”-4”, compared with a 9”+ thick

barrel vault dome. Plus, the barrel vault oven burns

more wood (which isn't good for the environment or

your pocketbook). For many owners, heat up time is

the difference between using their oven during the

workweek, or not at all. Round oven owners use their

ovens a couple of times a week, and sadly, we know

barrel vault oven owners who never fire their ovens.

2. Pizza should cook at 700ºF, or higher. The Pompeii

Oven can easily reach and hold that heat, baking

authentic Italian pizza for long periods of time. The

heavier oven has serious trouble reaching and

holding those high temperatures. The problem with

too much thermal mass is that the heat from your fire

must heat the entire mass. That means that heat is

continually moving away from the inside of you oven,

where you want it for cooking, toward the outer edge

of the thermal mass. That continues to happen until

the entire mass is heated, which can take a very, very

long time in a barrel vault oven. For more information,

read the Thermal Mass Primer (Appendix 5).

3. The Pompeii Oven is designed for fire-in-the-oven

cooking and pizza. With a round oven you have room

for your fire on one side, and your food and pizza on

the other side and in the back. The entire oven can be

easily reached. With a 32x36 rectangular cooking

floor in a barrel vault oven, there is not a good place

for the fire. If you put it on one side, you have very

little room for food on the other side, and you cannot

access the back. If you put the fire in the back, the

heat and flame does not reflect to the front of the

oven. A 35" round Pompeii Oven gives you much

more usable space than a 32x36. For all the effort you

are going to be putting into installing a wood-fired

oven, a 32x36 rectangular oven is a one-pizza oven --

which is a shame.

4. The Pompeii Oven cooks more evenly. The round,

spherical dome does a better job of bouncing heat

evenly on the cooking floor. You can cook pizza

everywhere (or roasts and veggies) in the oven, and it

cooks evenly. That is how the high volume pizzerias

cook all those pizzas. The rectangular barrel vault

design gives you hot and cool spots, depending on

the location of the fire.

6. The Pompeii Oven also helps direct the airflow better

in a chimney-less oven, as the air sweeps in low, up

the back & sides and washes over the face of the

dome before exiting the upper 1/3rd of the doorway.

7. There are also little things, like easier clean up.

The only downside is that a pizza oven can only bake

around 20-30 loaves of bread from a single firing, not 75.

But for a home oven, that typically works well. You can

bake more bread than you could ever eat.

There are millions of pizza ovens in Italy, and they are all

round. I also think it is interesting that there is a great deal

of wood-fired bread in Italy (Pane Cotto a Legna), which is

baked in large commercial, rectangular barrel vault ovens.

It is clear that there are two basic wood-fired oven

designs: pizza ovens and bread ovens, so you should

think about how you want to use your oven.