Cooking Ovens

Our all-purpose cooking ovens Etna are perfect for your everyday cooking. Many people still relate wood fired ovens with only pizza cooking, but really in this wood fired oven you can cook anything you can cook in your kitchen oven. The Etna wood fired oven can turn a simple family meal or a dinner with friends into something special. You can even spit roast your Christmas ham in the Etna!

The Design.
Wood fired brick ovens are as old as Portugal itself. As in all Mediterranean countries people have cooked in them for centuries passing an oven and withgoing traditions from generation to generation. And now in most parts of Europe the brick oven is the new outdoor cooking trend and is back as primary house cooker. The design of our traditional Portuguese brick ovens Etna allows for perfect heat distribution inside the cooking vault because if its multi-faceted inner surface: bricks radiate heat inside the oven at every possible angle, there are no cold spots! Also they create the necessary thermal mass for heat to be absorbed and stored in the oven vault, and then to be slowly released inside the oven. The higher dome of the Etna oven allows for better circulation of intense yet not damaging heat, perfect for bread and your daily cooking!

The Food.
Our Etna oven with its higher dome delivers a remarkable array of dishes: amazing slow cooked stews, fish in many ways, paellas, roasts like you never had before, slow cooked soups, vegetables and potatoe dishes, great rotisseries with our rotisserie set especially made for the Etna ovens, grilled sausages and steaks, and of course fantastic home made breads and pizzas. They easily reach 350C to bake amazing crusty focaccias and pizzas in just 2 minutes!
Home made breads, pizzas, and slow cooked stews from the brick oven have become the most popular items on the wood fired menu in Europe and are gaining popularity here as well.

The Oven.
As our Pizzaioli ovens, our Etna ovens are 100% hand made in Portugal. First a cement base is poured, reinforced with steel. Then the floor is covered with natural yellow sand for even heat distribution on which the refractory terracotta tiles are laid. Then the dome is build from rounded natural clay refractory bricks. It takes days to finish even one oven as much care is taken to make the dome shape perfect for better heat radiation and circulation. Once the last key brick at the top of the dome is set, a 2cm layer of Lafarge insulating cement is applied over the bricks. Once dried, 6 mm thick rock wool (mineral) is used for better insulation which is then tied up with chicken wire. Then another layer of refractory cement is sprayed on and smoothed to perfection before the Cork paste gets sprayed on. This patented cork mix consists of natural cork, colour pigments and resin and protects the oven from the elements making it a great asset to your outdoor earea.
The Etna is completely finished. However if you wish you can easily personalise it by applying stucco, tiles, stone veneer, build it in, or just paint it to change the colour. You will get some corkmix to touch up possible exterior hairline cracks. Hairline cracks are normal for dome shaped ovens but minimal with this oven, they present no danger to the oven itself or to your reputation as an expert chef.

The Love.
The natural terracotta refractory bricks, clay tiles oven floor, spherical dome, and the wood fire combine to deliver tastes which are not easy to be pulled away from. Our ovens stand out for their looks, functionality, built and the ambience they create and they already found thousands of loving homes from Canada to Australia. Not to mention Italy, Spain and Portugal where a wood fired brick oven is part of life. Ask a happy owner and he will tell you: it’s not just an oven, it becomes part of the home, part of the week-ends, part of beers with friends, part of backyard parties, part of Sunday family dinners. Let it become part of your life too!