Turn Your Home Kitchen Into A Pizzeria With This DIY Idea From Julia Child

Your kitchen should be a warm, relaxing place where people enjoy coming together to cook and eat homemade meals. But if you don't have the right supplies, you might find the kitchen to be a stressful environment. If you've ever attempted to make pizza without the proper equipment, you've probably had a bad kitchen experience. If you don't have the right tools, pizza crust comes out soggy, especially in the middle. Luckily, American chef Julia Child, who became a household name for her long-running program, "The French Chef," offered a wonderful solution to this problem: firebricks.

To evenly cook your pizza crust, you might need a more intense heat than what your home oven offers. As Julia Child pointed out, you can modify your home oven by placing firebricks on one of its racks. These bricks are very porous, which allows them to trap heat and become much hotter than the inside of the oven. Over her long career, Julia Child offered plenty of tips for improving home kitchens. This is one handy hack that can not only help you make your oven into an at-home pizza oven, but can work on other bread-based foods and impress all your friends when they come to your next dinner party.

You can find a pack of six firebricks at Home Depot for about $36. These are the same types of bricks that line professional pizza ovens. When it's time to cook a pizza, fully remove the rack, place the bricks on it, evenly spaced, and build the pizza on the bricks. Put a little bit of olive oil on the bricks to keep the pizza from sticking. You can use this same design for making perfectly un-soggy pie crusts and charred roast veggies. When not in use, you can display them artistically on your countertop in a thick seagrass basket, which gives rustic French countryside vibes that are sure to be Julia Child-approved.

These bricks can withstand heat as high as 2,700 degrees, but don't be surprised if they start to crack over time. As you know, they are easily replaceable. You may instead decide to invest in  a pizza stone. It has the same heat-retaining properties as firebricks, but it comes all in one piece with handles on the side that make it easy to pick up. If you want to upgrade you home pizzeria, you can build a DIY brick oven in your backyard. These firebricks also work well for building a cozy DIY fire pit.