Our Oven Story: The First Mobile Oven

Chapter 1 | Part 2. Rocket Stoves, a Gold Vauxhall Nova and Georgios Pizzas

George's first mobile oven was made of reinforced concrete. It was a difficult build, and when it was finished, it wasn't really what he was after. Too heavy, too inflexible, not the style of cooking he had in mind. So he started again.

What he found was the rocket stove. The principle is straightforward: by controlling airflow through an insulated combustion chamber, a rocket stove generates intense, directed heat from very little wood, far more efficiently than a conventional open fire. The technology was not new. Rocket stoves had been used at scale for tobacco drying, and at a smaller scale in developing communities where almost any combustible material could be used to boil water quickly and cleanly.

It took George roughly a year and a half of trial and error before the oven worked the way he wanted. Once it did, he had a working prototype, built in skeletal form onto a trailer, ready to go out into the world.

Wanting to give the whole thing a bit more presence, George decided the oven's natural home was the back of a gold Vauxhall Nova, engine stripped out and replaced with a fridge, mounted on its own trailer. Neither George nor Aurora had any real metalworking skills, which made the whole process of handling and adapting the Nova an education in itself. You learn quickly when there is no other option.

It was playful, slightly absurd, and it worked. People at events started asking specifically where the gold Vauxhall with the pizza oven had got to.

It was during this period that George met Aurora, who was working in catering and brought exactly the understanding the project had been missing. George's Pizzas began to take shape: an L200 towing the trailer out to events and parties, dough collected from Gordon and Katie at Tracebridge, and Aurora increasingly shaping what got served and making sure it was genuinely good.

Next: the mobile years prove harder than expected, and a reconnection with an old friend offers the first proper bricks and mortar home.