I have to jump in on this topic. I’ve been intrigued by wood fired ovens for years, I also was looking into adding an oven to our mobile food business so I did some research on brick ovens and know a couple of people who have them (mobile units from other suppliers). Every person I spoke with told me that if I wanted a wood fired oven I’d have to pay what they did AND a couple actually said it’d have to be imported from Italy to be any good. Most of them paid several thousand dollars for a smallish round pizza oven which (according to them) was the ONLY design that could/would work. I now look at them as “oven snobs”.
Well, I couldn’t convince the wife to shell out several grand for a backyard oven that I wanted to start with to gain experience AND have one always available at home. So, off to the internet to see what I could come up with that would:
A. Work well
B. Is cost efficient
C. Looked good
D. Wasn’t made of corn cobs or self made bricks / mud
E. Is cost efficient as it had to pass by the “COO” (did I mention that before?).
After long debate I settled on a Barile Grande and we were off to the races! After it was built I was having issues with proper heating so I scoured other oven sites to see what might be the issue ( I chose to ignore the advice I’d gotten on there). I ran into all sorts of “helpful” advice from “you got cheated” to “tear it down and start over with XXXX design by our manufacturer” or my favorite “it’s a poor design and not technically correct… it will never work so get rid of it and by this oven for a several grand”.
So, after feeling totally bummed and cheated I decided I’d spent way too much time and effort building this oven AND there were too many visible success stories to give up on it. I came back here, read through all the stuff again and sent an email or two to the company and tried again.
Well, it turns out that the oven does work very, very well though I’ve still got some kinks to work out which, in my opinion are completely my fault due to lack of time to run it frequently enough to figure it all out. Eventually I’ll just either break down and go to a class or be able to go to the Pizza Expo seminars in Las Vegas.
One thing I did learn is bigger is NOT always better. The Barile Grande is/was wayyyyy larger than I honestly needed but that wasn’t apparent until after I got the form. The running joke is I could always switch over to a crematorium for extra income LOL. I guess go big or go home right?
The bottom line is yes, there are detractors out there just like there are with every other product on earth. Chevy is better than Ford or vise versa and one has to buy a Caddy to have a smooth ride but you DON’T have to spend thousands to have a great pizza / bread / roasting oven!
To that I say “bollocks”, this oven works very well, it’s just as good as the person operating it.
- TwoDips