Outdoor Kitchen Tour

Canning Kitchen and Live Fire Pizza Oven

Summertime is made for outdoor cooking, and for us, that’s more than just an annual Memorial Day BBQ.

We do A LOT of outdoor cooking… campfire cooking… rocket stove cooking… outdoor canning… baking, dehydrating, and just about every other way you can get your cook on outdoors.

This newsletter contains affiliate links.

A few years back, I shared pictures of my “outdoor canning kitchen” set up in the middle of our blueberry patch.

It’s not much, just a big three-burner propane cooker that I can use to set up my Amish Canner and a steam juicer or pot of jam on the side.

I’m out there canning fruit, tomatoes, juice, jam, and pickles for the better part of July and August every year.

It gets the job done and keeps the heat out of the house, but on those hot, sun-baked summer days, I found myself really wishing for a bit of shade. (And I always dreaded getting caught by a summer afternoon thunderstorm right in the middle of a batch.)

We put up over 1000 jars of canned goods each year, and much of it is fresh food in the summer months, so I finally decided that this year is the year we’re going to put up a real outdoor kitchen.

With a roof! A real, honest-to-goodness roof!

We’ve built all manner of structures here on the homestead from scratch, but this year, I was hoping to make it easier on myself, so we got a kit. Wow, what a game changer.

All told, it went up in about 8 to 10 hours of hands-on time, with two adults working together while keeping an eye on the littles running around the yard eagerly awaiting their first popsicle in Mama’s new kitchen.

Right about the time we completed it, we caught wind of a local commercial kitchen auction from a restaurant going out of business, and we’re able to outfit it for next to nothing. (Keep an eye on your local auction websites y’all, it’s totally worth it.)

My canning setup went right in, of course, but there’s also space for food prep, grilling, and dinner outside.

This baby will hold 36 pint jars at once, and that’s definitely enough to get ‘er done.

It was just about perfect.

Almost…

Just one more finishing touch.

While we were building my new canning kitchen, I got a note from a product manager at Breeo. She said that they had just designed a new wood-fired pizza oven add-on to go on top of their backyard fire pits.

They asked me if I’d like to test one, and I said sure! 

I didn't promise them a positive review (or any review at all, actually).  They knew we do a lot of outdoor cooking year-round, and they just wanted me to put it through its paces to see how these units hold up to heavy use.

I’ll be honest, I was skeptical.

When you’re working with a traditional masonry pizza oven, the idea is that it has a lot of thermal mass. You fire it the day before, and the walls soak up the heat. In the old days, they’d then pull the embers out and work with the oven's residual heat over the next 24 hours.

It was a marathon, first baking pizza and flatbreads in the ultra-hot 900+ degree oven, then switching to pies (450 F), then bread (400 to 350 F), then slow cooking roasts (300 to 200 F), and finally just dehydrating garden produce like tomatoes and herbs (150 to 90 F).

How is something made of steel without all that thermal mass going to work?

Well, differently, of course.

And, honestly, much better suited to the modern cook. No cooking marathon, just really hot, really fast.

We built a fire in the bottom fire pit and put the pizza oven on, expecting it to take a a few hours to come up to temp…and then less than 5 minutes later, the oven was just shy of 900 degrees!

Well, that was quick.

No masonry to hold the heat means no masonry to heat up either, and you can literally start a fire and have a pizza cooking at pizzeria temperatures in minutes. Crazy!

I assumed we’d have to feed it like a steam engine to keep it hot, but nope. The way it drafts, we added one small piece of wood every 5 to 8 minutes, and it stayed between 700 and 900 degrees without much fuss.

And I mean small pieces of wood, like a pencil to a broom handle in diameter, and 12-18 inches long (not a whole log). To keep a hot fire, the wood has to be small, so it burns fast, but you don’t need that much wood altogether.

At those temperatures, a pizza cooks in 2 to 3 minutes, and it’s in and out just like that.

It’s perfect for rocking through a personal pan pizza for everyone in the family, with whatever toppings suit your tastes.

My husband and I went fancy with salami, fresh mozzarella, red onion, pine nuts, and pesto.

The littles stuck with traditional cheese pizza, and both turned out amazing.

We made a huge batch of pizza dough for our first firing, expecting that loading a pizza onto a stone with a peel would have a learning curve.

Honestly, I was pretty sure the first 5 attempts would be a crumpled mass of dough that stuck to the peel and landed all wadded up in the oven.

Nope!

So long as the peel is dusted with flour or cornmeal, the dough slides right off with a quick flick of the wrist.

Here’s my husband’s very first throw into a pizza oven:

If you want a nice crisp crust, toss in a single piece of wood about 1-2 minutes before you load the pizza, and it’ll hit 700 to 900 degrees. The pizza will be one in 90 seconds to 2 1/2 minutes, depending on how you like it.

If you’re like my kids, and you like your pizza barely done, you can let the temp drop to 500 to 600 degrees, and you won’t have any char spots, just well-browned pizza.

We alternated: Feed the oven one small piece of wood, load an adult pizza, cook for 2 minutes, then prep the kids' pizza. By the time they got their toppings just right on the peel, the oven was at a perfect kids' pizza temperature, and theirs cooked a bit slower…but it was still done in about 4-5 minutes.

Now, our backyard oasis is pretty much complete.

Canning kitchen? Check!

Live Fire Pizza Oven? Check!

Really awesome trampoline that doubles as a whole family tent? Check!

(I’ll talk about that last one soon, my friends, but in another letter.)

All in all, we spent less than half the average cost of a week-long vacation for a family of 4, and we have our own little slice of heaven right in our own backyard. Forever.

We’re homebodies. We like it here.

We focus our attention on crafting a life (and a space) that we don’t need to take a vacation from, and this little project has already sponsored a number of Friday night family pizza nights this month that are infinitely better than takeout.

In both taste and memories. And, at a fraction of the cost in the long run.

I’m at 60+ hours in the outdoor canning kitchen this month, the littles are well over 40 hours of bouncing in the trampoline (protected from the sun and bugs, and building killer calf muscles to boot).

This pizza oven is built to last, and I’m betting we’re going to be eating homemade pizza from it a decade from now. It’s simple, and there’s just nothing to break.

We’ll be here, my friends. Anybody want a slice?

Until Next Time,

Ashley at Practical Self Reliance

PS. When I reported back that we loved the pizza oven, the folks at Breeo sent me a coupon code for y’all to get 5% off anything on their site. Just use code PSR5 for 5% off.