My wife showed up just as I was starting the first fire... more-or-less completely in shock that I was building a fire in the pizza oven even though our flue liners were barely level with the roof, the flashing wasn't done, and rain was coming in the house around the chimney! It took about 30 seconds for the look on her face to go from "have you gone completely mad" to "I'll run and get the stuff to make pizzas." A few words were exchanged, but they really weren't necessary! When the oven turned white inside, (and when I placed my hand inside the oven for 10 seconds and it singed off all of the hairs), we suspected it was hot enough to cook pizzas. We were right - our first pizza cooked in less than 5 minutes and it was a great success. Several more pizzas followed... a few quickly morphed into brick oven stir-fries when I launched the toppings but not the dough from the wooden peel! To make a long story short, we ran out of pizza materials before we ran out of appetites. We are still learning how to use the oven properly (more on that later), and possibly due to my complete and total disregard for a proper break-in cycle, the liner of our pizza oven has a few hairline cracks (which do not really concern me - I figured it would crack somewhere sooner or later.). But all in all, we are bonding very well with our brick oven. In the 8 days following the initial firing, we have cooked 6 meals in the oven. (7 meals if you count the post-apocalyptic roast chicken, but we won't talk about that!) My advice for anyone contemplating a brick oven (indoors or outdoors) is this: whether you use the kit that I used or build-from-scratch, I would study the dimensions of this particular kit closely, because this thing works great. Its function has exceeded our expectations (smoke draw, easy of starting a fire, time to bring up to heat, cooking area, heat retention, etc.) . Previously, we wondered whether this oven would be a rarely used novelty or a serious cooking tool. No doubt, it is the latter!
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