I was thinking of the other way - I’ll head to Texas and work for pizza helping you build yours 
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Ha, good point, i hadn’t thought about that!
I used to live around the corner from a bakery, and they used coal for their ovens. Summer nights, when the windows were open, and the warm breeze would carry the aroma into our home…omg, I’ll bet heaven smells exactly like that.
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Ha! That was you! I debated a long time about a round dome versus barrel vault. My Italian experience said dome, but my French baking said vault. I went with Rado Hand’s basic design and modified it. Next one I build is going to be on a trailer and is going to be a dome.
At an old job, one of the neighbors coal bbqed nearly everyday once it got over 75? Between them and the Italian place a block over cooking up huge batches of garlic sauces…omg…i left work hungry a lot.
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The barrel is good for bread and the dome is better for pizza. But a typical pizza done is shallower than my design. I did a hybrid to enable good results with both - circular shape gives you a larger area for round pies and the higher dome gives you good crusty bread results. You just can’t pack in nice orderly rows of bread so overall you get fewer loaves in there. But since it was for the backyard I didn’t think I’d need to be baking 3 dozen loaves at a time 
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If there are several options available, always choose Italian.
But I’m biased, of course, lol
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Now that could be worked out! 
Did I ever tell you guys that my dad owned a pizza shop (and later also morphed into a casual restaurant) for 30 years?
I worked there from 8 - 27, more & more as I got older; every Saturday, every summer, every holiday off from school, and then also anytime that he was short staffed / had to go away from something.
It wasn’t always easy me, especially when other kids were going to the beach and parties and stuff like that, not to mention during college (accounting major is not a breeze), plus internship, and even while working 100+ hour weeks as a full time accountant at one of the big 6 (back then, now 4). But now I really cherish those memories, thank my parents for that upbringing, and I would go back & do it all over again if I could.
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So where do obtain coal? As a kid you could sometimes find it along with taconite pellets along the railroad tracks, but ever since the power plants switched to natural gas I imagine that source has dried up.
You can buy it online
I think Anthracite is the highest quality, but others will correct me if I am wrong.
There is actually a movement to go back to home heating with it; much more convenient than wood or pellets…and it puts out A LOT of BTUs:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=buy+Anthracite+coal&src=IE-TopResult&FORM=IETR02&conversationid=
Paying to ship coal in less than train car size loads somehow doesn’t seem right to me ($29.99 for 25 lbs and free shipping on Amazon.)
From how dad talks about coal deliveries I’m questioning the practical wisdom of going back to coal.
Just get a really big stocking, and make sure to stay on the Naughty List! 
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Check for fuel distributors in your area. I throw coal into my oven when we’re doing big parties. Its higher BTU content helps recharge the deck (baking a pizza pulls heat from the deck) faster than wood alone. If you do that you want pea anthracite.
The classic pizza places in the U.S. - Lombardi’s in NYC and Pepe’s in New Haven are coal ovens. But they’re “white ovens” - the coal is burned in a separate chamber and the hot gases routed around the cooking chamber. Typical woodfired ovens are black ovens where the wood burns in the cooking chamber. Part of knowing you’ve heat charged the mass enough is when the soot (carbon) on the bricks burns off as it burns once the bricks hit 1000F.
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I just ate and you guys are making me so hungry. Guess Chinese didn’t really hit the spot today…where’s good pizza when you NEEED it 
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This is amazing. How much do you think this would cost in materials? At most basic?
Well under a grand. The biggest expense ends up in how you finish it - I put a granite tile counter on mine along with a faux Italian tile roof, My buddy probably spent $3K on his complete with 12’ long attached wet bar and custom granite counters Others leave it as a bare dome and they’re done pretty cheaply. You can do it in a month of weekends or a couple of weeks of more heads down work - there’s dead time while you let some of the concrete cure so you can’t just build it start to finish.
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You’ve inspired me. I’ve thought about this before; I have celiac disease, so no REAL pizza for me. So to make my own, and make it in a brick oven, well, that would be amazing, since my pizza choices are generally pretty awful. I mean, I could just keep using my regular oven, but, why??? Thank you! So awesome of you to share your plans with the world.
Good luck with it and if you do a build, let me know if you have any questions (I still get them from all over the world ).
I did them because I live sort of but not really near the best pizza in the world (New Haven CT rules) but it’s hard to justify a 2 hour roundtrip for a pie (well, at least to most folks).
Jim (the owner of FornoBravo) and I hooked up as he’s a fanatic about backyard ovens and started his company as a result (after retiring from MCI) - even moved the family to Italy for a sabbatical while he got it off the ground. He helped me with research on what the local Italian oven builders were doing and graciously hosts the plans and a whole community of folks building them even though he sells commercial pre-fab ovens (he says the Italian equivalent of Home Depot carries pre-fabs and kits and no one things that’s special over there).
Oh, and for vegans, a brick oven is the only thing getting hot enough to really melt some of those cheese substitutes into a creamy gooey melty consistency
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