Last week on Slice, I showed you some photos of a home-built backyard pizza oven in Kansas City with a promise that I'd try to chat with the builder. Here's the result, a quick interview with its builder-owner. Name: Dan Curry Age: 31 Location: Kansas City Occupation: Lawyer I've been told you used eight different kinds of brick and took seven months to build this oven. True? Just two kinds of bricks, fire bricks, and a few regular bricks. I did use five different kinds of concrete.... More

A good friend of mine, Andy G., who lives in Kansas City and who I've known since college days, emailed me last Friday: "I'm going to my friend Dan's place for pizza tomorrow. He built his own backyard oven." So earlier this week, Andy emails me a link to some photos of Dan's oven, along with this info: It was amazing. Some of the best pizza I have ever had. He used a good dough recipe and made a great sauce from scratch. But the oven:He used EIGHT different types of brick.It took him over SEVEN months to build.I... More

From last week's New York Times Travel section—Mario Batali and family kickin' it Michigan style. Naturally, the pizza-oven bits caught my eye. (That's Batali's imported wood-burner at right.) Watching Mario Batali shovel a pizza topped with chopped tomatoes, wet chunks of fresh mozzarella and grilled artichokes into his crackling outdoor pizza oven, it is easy to imagine you are in a hill town outside Bologna, perhaps even in Borgo Capanne, where Mr. Batali apprenticed for three years at a trattoria. The surrounding spruce trees and the wind off the lake only add to the air of authenticity, as does the... More