Camp Oven Pizza; is it possible?
One of our go to kids camping meals is pizza, and it gets done all the time, but we normally use our Baby Weber Q. However, I detest getting it out and setting it up, and we’ve done Camp Oven Pizza a couple of times now, with mixed results.
To clarify, we do this exactly the same in the Weber, but we just drop the pizza in the camp oven with a decent fire going, and pull it out (hopefully) when its nice and cooked. Pizza is a pretty common camp cooking option for us, and its easy to make.
What do you need?
- Camp oven large enough to fit a pizza
- Pizza bases (we buy them from Woolworths)
- Toppings like mozzarella cheese, bacon, chicken, onion, pineapple, mushroom, salami and anything else you like.
- Sauce. We use tomato, pizza sauce or BBQ
- Tongs and a scraper to pick the pizza up
Cooking the pizza
Our best results have been when we’ve had the camp oven insanely hot. By this, I don’t mean literally sitting on the fire, but sitting on a decent heap of coals away from the fire, with a massive amount on top of the lid.
We cook the pizza sitting on the trivet (so its not getting burnt on the bottom), and the heat from the top needs to be substantially more as you want the toppings to melt at the same time as the base cooking.
We’ve had best results leaving the pizza in for about 12 – 15 minutes, and not opening the camp oven at all, but if you are doing it for the first time its worth opening it to see how its going.
Keep a decent fire going nearby so you can keep renewing the coals, as we find it can take the better part of an hour to cook 4 or more pizzas, and the coals fairly quickly lose their ability to heat well.
Looking for more amazing camping meal ideas? We’ve got 50 in this post to get you started!
Getting the pizza in and out
With a camp oven, the hardest part is getting the pizza in and out. Actually, getting it in is easy; you just carry it with two hands and drop it in the centre, carefully avoiding the scorching camp oven.
Getting it out though, is much harder, and works best if its well cooked. If the bottom isn’t crispy, you will end up with toppings sliding off and making a mess of your camp oven (and ruining your pizza!).
I use tongs, and a metal scraper, and lift the pizza up and slide the scraper under it, whilst avoiding the hot camp oven, and it works pretty well if its well cooked. If its not, well, you’ll get a few mangled pizzas like we’ve had!
Is it easier in the Weber?
Yep, by far. Despite the additional setup, its so much easier to cook. You can cook it on the aluminium pizza plates, and you always get decently cooked pizza. The moisture seems to be able to escape easier, there’s no coals to knock into your camp oven because you’ve loaded it up so much and its just easier in general.
Going forward, we’ll probably still do camp oven pizza, but it is a lot more simple in the weber!
