Earth oven is added over everything. The food in the pit can take up to several hours to a full day to cook, regardless of the dry or wet method used. Today, many communities still use cooking pits for ceremonial or celebratory occasions, including the indigenous Fijian lovo, the Hawaiian imu, the Māori hāngi, the Mexican barbacoa, and the New England clam bake. The central Asian tandoor use the method primarily for uncovered, live-fire baking, which is a transitional design between the earth oven and the horizontal-plan masonry oven. This method is essentially a permanent earth oven made out of clay or
Masonry oven pizza. In the same way that masonry oven cooking techniques haven’t changed much over the millennia, neither have construction practices. Whether built with mud, brick, or modern refractories, any oven is basically a masonry shell, a smaller version of structures such as the Roman Pantheon, Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence, or Houston’s Astrodome. Early ovens were simply clay soil (usually tempered with sand to reduce cracking, as in brick-making) built up over a form of sticks or sand. When the clay was stiff enough to cut open a doorway, you dug out the sand, or burned out the wood. Smoke is