Lets connect pizza oven, pancake place and smokehouse

Welcome to Estonia. This is a short clip I got in July in 2019, which describes a bit our flat country.

Estonia is famous for its smokehouse culture, we smoke fish on the seasides, and meat in inland. As we also like to eat something else, like pizzas and pancakes and bread, then we had an idea of combining a smokehouse, a stove and a pizza oven. As we did not find anything like this on Earth, we were unsure that it could work out, but it was worth trying it.

Here is the basic plan of the outdoor kitchen that we had in our mind:

So, fire in the pizza oven gives smoke to the smokehouse. For pancakes the stove can be used. There is a small watertank on top of the pizza oven for tap water. Roof measures would be around 5 x 4 meters.

So we went for some shopping. The longest wood beams were 6 meters long, and 15x15cm width.

Next levels were stones for basement and oven itself.

It weighs... some kilograms.

Even the wild metal stove appeared to the site, on top of the trailer.

For the basement we used Fibo 5MPA blocks, connected them with metal rods inside the cement. And we tried to understand the size of the arc, because the smokehouse should not be too high in ergonomic reasons. Funny arc or what?

Then we put up the roof. In Estonia there is a saying that summer is the most beautiful day in the year, so there is a lot of rain and snow incoming from the top. We need roofs here.

Inside the pizza stove we put some insulation, otherwise the heat of the flame would go inside the basement, and it would take a lot of time to heat it up. The whole stove weighs around 4 tons, so heating it up to 200 degrees for pizza/bread would take hours.

Then we put up the first arc. Diameter of the oven is 65cm. We used some wood support to do it, and it took a day for an arc to become solid. Under the arc there is the air inlet. First arc ready here!

Here you can see the wooden support and the second arc.

All arcs are formed and covered with some cement.

This is usually where the pizza oven ends - the chimney. But on top of that the smokehouse will be built. And again, insulation is the keyword to make awesome pizza and bread.

 

Sometimes you have to make yourself really small. Find me. Air inlet holes can be seen from here on the side of the oven. It will be the eighth chimney in my life that I will put up here. At this point I really tried to think as a smoke, as I would not want to end with smoke corridor-system, that does not work. You would not want to make food with smoke all around you. True, it is rather short, only around 3.5 meters from ground, so a lot of "thinking as a smoke" was going on here.

There is never too much love on this planet.

I had to test how much meat can be smoked in the smokehouse. Seems that at least 90kg-s fit inside it. Actually I am removing the beams that supported concrete-works here to create a tilted roof for smoke flow.

 I have absolutely no idea why this picture was taken.

Floors are awesome, so the pizza-pancake-smokehouse also needed one.

Then it was time to make a fire, after two weeks of drying. We made a small opening under the stove pipe, that goes directly up to the chimney, and we burnt some newspaper there to get the chimney working. As the chimney is only 3 meters high, then it needs some support system like this to teach the smoke its way out. After burning paper you can make fire in the pizza oven. And we figured out that for the burning and baking process there has to be a cover in front of the oven.

You can see the first testdrive of the pancakes at the same day.

The oven itself had to dry for a week. For the pizza I heated the oven for an hour at least. Without insulation inside the oven it would take more, as it would take several hours to heat the mass of the stones to get warm. When there is no blue flame on top of the ashes and the oven is not too warm, then its right time to push the ashes to the back, clean the oven floor, and put the pizza into the oven.

Pizzas have been absolutely delicious so far. Its nothing compared to the taste from electric oven. And the process itself is also lovely - to make food in the open air.

For the tap water in the outdoor kitchen, I put a 200-liters water tank on top of the stove, and Earth physics do the job from the tank to the lower located tap.

Smoking meat takes some precision. The meat has to be in salt water for the night, afterwards you drain it. You have to warm up to whole smoking area at full power at first for an hour (de-eliminating bitter taste from wood), and afterwards you kill all air inlet and push extra air to the chimney to slow the air movement, sometimes even watering the logs while burning too intensively. The first 30 minutes the meat has to be at around 100 degrees, so that the outer areas get dry while inside it is still raw, and after that decreasing the temperature gets the meat a great taste. Smaller pieces of meat will be ready in around 2..3 hours of smoking. Taste is absolutely ........ Cannot say the word :)

Anyway, white smoke has to come out from the chimney during the process, just like when the pope is being elected :)

One thing more - lights - don't forget them. We simply put three led lights, and a small piece of wood against them, that creates a warm indirect lighting.

Smokehouse works awesomly good, and so does the pizza oven. Pizzas from that oven are truly highly delicious. Well, it takes some time to get used with this, as there isnt any temperature regulator here, but it is with all things anyway.

Some words about damage: after 3 years of usage smoke has turned only the smokehouse's top stones a bit smoky. Ceiling on top of it is unaffected. Well, looks more natural to us.

So, for the proof-of-concept, the combination of pizza oven, pancake stove and smokehouse is possible on this planet.