If you are considering buying or building a pizza stove to bake pizza in your home, there is one extremely important factor that you need to consider. A traditional pizza oven made of clay or brick is prone to cracking, leading to burnt or undercooked pizzas. If the cracks get big enough or develop in vital areas, your pizza oven could completely collapse. To minimize this risk, when your kiln is first built it must go through a process called ‘curing’.

Seasoning a pizza oven is a long process. First, you need to let your oven dry out on its own for a week. Building a fire to dry out the kiln faster will cause cracks. If you live in a humid climate, you may want to wait longer. Once this is done, you must dedicate five more days to making a fire and maintaining a constant temperature for at least 8 hours a day, the more the better. Start at 150ºC the first day, then increase 10ºC every day thereafter. This gradual increase in temperature “hardens” your oven and accustoms it to the heat.

Only solid woods can be used to season a kiln. You cannot use charcoal, splintered wood, or woods with sap such as pine. You cannot use any type of liquid, such as lighter fluid or gasoline, to start the fire. Water cannot be used to extinguish the fire.

Unfortunately, I’ve heard too many stories of people who seasoned their wood oven by following the instructions implicitly, yet it still cracked. Even though the cracks didn’t appear right away, due to the constant temperature changes in the outside weather, the amazing wood fired pizza oven tool is constantly expanding and contracting, leading to cracks.

An alternative to a clay or brick wood-fired oven is a stainless steel wood-fired oven. The floor of this oven has 30mm thick refractory bricks, not unlike a traditional wood-burning pizza stove. A stainless steel exterior means your oven is waterproof, so don’t rush outside with a tarp when it rains. One of the best benefits of a stainless steel oven is that it does not crack and therefore does not require seasoning. You can literally take it out of the box, assemble it, and start cooking delicious pizzas the same day.