Lovin' the Pizza Oven

Raise your hand if pizza is one of your favorite foods. Us too! Now, how about a toasty, fresh, wood-fired pizza customized just the way you like it? We’re drooling.

Camp Arrowhead has a brick oven right behind the kitchen that we’ve been loving. While we were excited to make our own pizza right away, the oven hadn’t been used in several years, so it took some time to get it in shape before testing it. The first step was cleaning it out - sweeping old ash that had accumulated, brushing the sides and top of the oven, and scrubbing the cooking surface. Since the opening is quite small, this was a little harder than it sounds, with brushes and rags on the end of broom handles to get all the way in the back corners!

Once it was cleaned out, we needed to slowly dry out any moisture that might have permeated the bricks over the past few years. This meant chopping lots of wood to heat it up bit by bit. Over the course of a week, we built a fire everyday in the pizza oven. The first day was a small fire, and day by day we made larger and hotter fires, letting them burn for longer. At the end of the week, the oven had temperatures over 800°F and we were ready to make our dinner.

Since the oven is so hot, you have to move quickly. The pizzas can cook in just 2-3 minutes, so we took turns making pizzas with our favorite toppings before sliding them into the oven, giving them a half-turn, pulling them out, and of course letting them cool a bit. All the hard work and patience was definitely worth it, folks. Cheesy, delicious pizza was a great reward.

As much fun as we have using the pizza oven, we can’t wait to share it with our campers this summer! Sundays are pizza days at Camp Arrowhead and everyone gets to build their own pizza, just how they want it. This is a great dinner to share together before heading to campfire to close out the day as a community.

If this has your mouth watering, why don’t you try to make your own pizza at home? To get you started, here’s a great recipe we found for making a tasty pizza sauce. Let us know how it goes!