How to make a DIY Pizza Oven for Camping with this Simple Trick

Pizza appears to be one of those foods that are universally liked by all kids, so it's always a good bet to try and do when camping.

We've tried all sorts of pizzas. The Pocket Pizzas have been really successful, and we've also made 'Pizza Pie' in the Dutch Oven.

We're still after that genuine pizza though, and after seeing how to make pizzas with a Cadac stove, I had an idea.

So here's an experiment we recently tried when camping: making a DIY Pizza Oven.

It worked a treat. Here's how...

What You Need

• A fire pit with a concave lid, such as the Outwell Cazal Fire pit that we used for this.
• Wood for burning, but if your campsite doesn't allow campfires, it works with BBQ Charcoal too.
• Lots of Aluminium Foil.

For the Pizzas

We kept this really simple and let the kids make their own pizzas.

• Pizza Bases. If you have time, of course making a proper pizza base is best, but we went with the easy option. Although the Cadac demo used pitta bread, I tried the Warburton's square sandwich wraps. With these sandwich wraps you get a lot more pizza. They turned out to be very good 'instant' pizza bases.
• Pizza sauce.
• Pizza toppings that don't require much cooking.

Making the DIY Pizza Oven

The problem with just placing the pizza onto the grill is that the underside of the pizza gets cooked but the top of the pizza, where you want to the cheese to melt, doesn't.

This is why you need a fire pit with a curved lid.

Line the lid with aluminium foil, with the shiny side on the inside.

The heat from your fire pit will come up around the pizza and reflect off the foil onto the top of the pizza.

Cooking the Pizzas on the DIY Pizza Oven

Place the pizzas onto the foil with the shiny side down.

Why? So that we don't overcook the bottom, giving enough time for the reflected heat from the foil-lined lid to reflect onto the top of the pizza.

The pizzas don't take long to cook (around 5 minutes once hot). It's easy to check how they are doing....just lift the lid of your fire pit, sorry, pizza oven 🙂

The Result

We were very impressed with the result from this simple modification of our fire pit.

The pizzas were cooked well on top and not burnt on the bottom. Fantastic 🙂

Improvements to the DIY Pizza Oven

Although they worked really well with BBQ Charcoal - and I suppose that technically makes this a BBQ'ed Pizza - I would like to try this with a wood fire.

If your campsite only allows BBQs and not campfires, then some BBQ wood chips sprinkled over the hot coals can give food that wood-fired taste.

Another useful addition would be a pizza stone.

I think then our pizzas would taste like true wood-fired stone-baked pizzas.

Go on, give it a go. Make your own Pizza Oven the next time you go camping.