Your Brick Oven Paperback – January 1, 2005

Whenever you see photos in glossy magazines of beautiful people in stylish clothes sitting round in dappled sunshine, laughing and sharing good food and wine, do you wonder why your life's not like that?Well now Russell Jeavons (of Willunga's `Russell's Pizzas' fame) paints us into a far earthier picture with `Your Brick Oven: Building it and baking in it' (Wakefield Press). The book is a step-by-step guide to exactly that and it has the immediate effect of making you want to turf the lifestyle porn, grab a bag of cement and work up an appetite.The central feat of the whole process is the construction of the oven whose domed cavity maximises the storage, convection and efficient circulation of heat from the wood fire. The dome is perhaps the most elemental yet complex of all structures. Versatile too: from humble dwellings like the igloo and yurt to St Peter's Basilica; from the utopian Millennium Dome to the tower of the Hiroshima prefecture building. But it also echoes the hemispheres of the planet, the upturned bowl of the sky, and bears more than a passing resemblance to our craniums.For these reasons alone, it seems well worth taking up Jeavons' challenge to build one with your own bare hands. A dome in the backyard - I'd like to suggest - will put you in touch with both the chequered history of human endeavour and the cosmos. Better still, build several and have spy satellites - or Earth Google - mistake your place for Pine Gap.Jeavons establishes a compelling connection between the ancient development of the brick oven and the evolution of courses from starters to desserts. Conservation of heat and fuel is the key. When the oven is `soaked', it reaches the sort of temperatures needed for things like pizzas. As it starts to cool, it's ready for baking bread, and roasting meats and vegetables, til, right at the end, it's cooled enough to bake cakes and tarts. The book provides us with mouth-watering recipes for all these treats and more.Instructional and atmospheric photographs, clear diagrams and stunning book design all further contribute to a slender volume that is educational, inspirational and easy on the eyes.Stephen AtkinsonAdelaideSouth Australia

Is it Small? Yes. Is it short? Yes. Does it give you needs to read more? OWWWW YES! But once there is no more, you can do it over, an over again.I am on my 6th time! Enjoy!

I’ve been planning on building a brick pizza oven for a little over a year. Most of the information that I have obtained to date has been online. However, I wanted a book for my nightstand to read up on the topic and hopefully reinforce some concepts of building a proper brick oven.I realized that this book was not the answer as soon as I read the author stating to not waste money on fire brick. This is probably the worst advice for building a brick oven. The bricks and insulation are the most important part of retaining heat. The heat retained in the bricks cooks your pizza. Additionally, the diagrams and techniques described are extremely vague and they are roughly half of the book. The other half of the book contains mostly unappetizing recipes which are clearly a ploy to fill pages. The pictures in the book are dull black and white and don’t show any detail. Overall, I couldn’t be more disappointed. I wish I could say that there is some useful information in this book, but there just isn’t.If you want to learn how to NOT build a brick oven or just want to build one halfazzed, then you should buy this book. Otherwise, if you are the type to take pride in your work and build a brick oven right the first time, don’t waste your money. I’d return this waste of paper if I wasn’t being charged $6 to return it. Maybe, I will use it to light the fires for my brick oven this summer.

My husband used this book to build a pizza/bread oven in our back yard. It gave good step-by-step instructions with solid information and pictures. Now, when we have visitors, we all work together to make the best tasting pizza you can get.

Thanks, this is exactly what I needed. Time to get to work.

Not what I hoped it to be. Not detailed enough to build a brick oven based on this book. The Bread Builder is a better book which I would recommend.

There no way someone could build an oven by reading this book. It is a joke: no details on the construction or the materials to use. Extremely oversimplified. As far as the second half of the book about cooking in the oven, it is another joke. A few (very few) again poorly explained recipes and again lacking details. If you want to build an oven (I have) buy THE BREAD BUILDERS by Alan Scott and Daniel Wing. When I read "YOUR BRICK OVEN I felt I had been taken

Great instructional guide on building and cooking in a brick oven. I built my oven almost 10 years ago and have fired it hundreds of times. Russell's insight into construction methods and cooking from the heart is both refreshing and inspiring. Probably not ideal for someone without basic building skills, but persevere and you will be rewarded tenfold! I would, and have recommended this book to friends

OK: I've read the other reviews and, more or less, they all are correct. I used this book as a basic guide and took over a year of scanning the Internet for more info. I found loads of encouraging stories, a ton of bad advise, and scores of photos of over-the-top, ostentatious, impractical, and expensive brick ovens. In the end I came back to this book and used it as a reference throughout the construction of my oven. Yes, it is true that to get the most out of the book you need to be pretty good at DIY projects, but in my opinion you should never attempt something like building a brick oven unless you ARE pretty good...and it is not a step by step, extremely detailed book of plans. However, I found that quite useful as it meant I could adapt his principles and suggestions to build MY oven, instead of building HIS oven. The value of the book is in it's simplicity and brevity: it makes you think and workout some of the details yourself. In the end you will understand a lot more about the principles and fundamentals of wood fired ovens than if you had just followed some set of tab-A-into-slot-B instructions.I found the book very, very useful, full of good tips, useful and uncluttered drawings and illustrations, written with wit, humor and obvious experience. It is NOT the bible of brick oven construction, but it IS one of the gospels.

EXPECTED MORE INFO ABOUT BUILDING THE OVENS. SUPPOSE IT'S MORE COFFEE TABLE READING THAT INSTRUCTIONAL

excellent value and delivery times

Not bad at all

Very useful