Your oven has turned out great, it certainly holds the heat well.
Cheers, thanks. I'll be curious to see what the temp is tonight, which will be 48h from firing.
How long did it take to get up to temp before starting cooking 
Hi Fizzie, I lit the fire at 4:15, and around 5'ish It was way hot enough to start some of the pre-cooking. It got up to about 500c by around 5:30-6'ish, so I probably had a little too much wood in the back of it to start (learning curve). That was a much faster pre-heat than I think is good for the long term life of the oven? The model we got was advertised as a 2 hour preheat to get it to 450c. It actually got there much quicker, but I think my initial firing was a bit too enthusiastic and I had too much wood in at the start. I'd stacked 6 big lumps of split hardwood across the back wall and built about a 400mm square fort fire in front of that with another 2 split hardwood lumps leaning against the front of that.
Around 5:30'ish I started roasting some pumpkin and an eggplant near the mouth of the oven, and made the tomato based pizza sauce in a frypan in the oven. I also had to fry off some mini meatballs and saute some mushrooms for the toppings. Then I baked a couple of flat breads and some melted brie dips for nibbles. We didn't actually start cooking the pizzas until around 7'ish, but the oven was at temp a good 1&1/2 hours before then. The pizza's were cooking in less time than the prep team could build them
We did learn a few thing from this first real firing - a bit less wood at the start would be better. We worked out you don't need a super hot oven at the start when you're making nibbles and prepping toppings while its preheating, and we also need to work on getting our dough mix right. We carefully followed the recipe but I think it was a bit too moist and I was having a little trouble sliding the raw pizza's off the peel onto the oven floor. Possibly the humidity affected the dough mix?
