Bread and Pizza Oven - Dominic Nicholas Studio

Building a wood fired brick pizza and bread oven was a long time dream of mine. I’d been experimenting with making sourdough breads since 2000. When we moved to Vermont in 2007, we met so many incredible and inspirational bread bakers such as Red Hen Baking, Trukenbrod Mill and Bakery, Bohemian Bakery (back when they were a wood-fired bread bakery), O Bread Bakery, Rise Up Bakery, Elmore Mountain Bread and Patchwork Farm and Bakery Vermont’s bread continues to be incredible thanks to these dedicated bakers.

In 2018, I had the opportunity to create an oven around which to build community and friends. My design, choice of materials and build process came from a synthesis of studies of books (e.g. “The Bread Builders – Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens“, by Allan Scott and Daniel Wing, and “Build Your Own Earth Oven“, by Kiko Denzer and Hannah Field) and online resources, especially YouTube. I decided on a dome shaped design which could cook both breads and pizzas, and with no prior experience with masonry or brick-layer, set forth! The result was a success around which we’ve gathered friends many times over the years. Many thanks to the friends that helped build this with me, and to our great community for continuing to come to our pizza parties!

Whilst not strictly art, here’s a slideshow of the build process:

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The foundation is framed out.

And here is some artsy slow motion footage of fire from the oven preheating. The video will automatically loop, so grab a drink, fullscreen that bad boy and sit back and relax:

Slow Motion Fire