The oven door

The first oven was a second-hand tabletop model bought on impulse, and the first pizza was a disaster: raw in the middle, black underneath, stuck to the peel, and served anyway. The twentieth pizza, three Fridays later, was the best we had ever eaten at home. Nothing in between was complicated — it was all about heat, dough and the flick of a wrist — but none of it was written down anywhere in one place, plainly. So we wrote it down.

Backyard Oven Notes is about the small pizza oven and nothing else: the tabletop gas and wood models, the pellet ovens, the modest brick dome someone builds in a weekend. Not grills, not smokers, not campfire cooking — those are their own worlds. This is the world of a stone at 450°C and a pizza that takes ninety seconds, and the whole notebook is about getting there and staying there.

How the bakes are written

One lesson per bake, in the order you'd actually meet them: choose, fire, dough, launch, top, use the leftover heat, host.

Honest about the black ones. Every oven owner makes charcoal pizzas for a few weeks. The notes say what went wrong with ours and what fixed it, rather than pretending the first one came out perfect.

Numbers, not vibes. Stone temperatures, hydration percentages, ball weights, seconds between turns. A pizza oven is a machine and it rewards being run like one.

Three languages

The bakes are written in English, Portuguese and Spanish for their own readers — flours, ovens sold locally, fuel available and what people put on a pizza differ from country to country, and each version is written for its own backyards.

Independence

Backyard Oven Notes is an independent editorial project. We bought the ovens, the flour and the thermometer. No manufacturer has paid for a mention; if that ever changes, the bake in question will say so at the top.

A question before you light it, or a pizza that keeps sticking? The order window is open.