After a couple of weeks of building, rendering, painting, tiling, and cleaning, we finally have the oven project pretty much complete. On Saturday we had our first pizza party and it was great. We’ve had about three practice sessions over the last week with varying degrees of success, all related to firing and fire control. This is something that’s going to take a while to master, like anything else interesting and unfamiliar, but on Saturday it all came together. We started the small kindling fire around 11:30 in the morning and built up the main fire, making sure the flames progressively built up the heat. Although we could have been cooking pizza after 20 minutes or so we built the fire over an hour or so, allowing the oven body to build up more retained heat.
We’d seen a video on YouTube (Uncle Dave’s Pizzaria) that inspired us to try cooking something else in addition to pizza, so we grabbed our cast iron frying pan, threw in some herbs from the garden along with onions and sausages and kept it in the doorway as we fired the oven. This turned out to be a hit, the sausages taking on some of the flavour of the ash-based fire.
The fire this time was much cleaner than the fires from earlier this week. It seems the trick is to get the fire burning with enough heat and vigour that any initially unburnt soot gets burnt higher up in the oven before it hits the chimney – this makes for a clean exhaust rather than a smokey exhaust that may start to annoy the neighbours. The roof of the oven changes from black and sooty to clean once this high temperature environment is reached.
So around 12:30 we started on the pizzas. In the past we’ve made ‘conventional’ pizza dough which is basically a bread dough mix with olive oil added, but I’ve gone away from this now as I no longer believe the olive oil is necessary for good pizza dough. (I actually think it makes for a worse dough as is messes with dough in terms of structure and cooking behaviour). So our dough was made from 1kg of ’00’ pasta/pizza flour, 650g water, 20g fresh yeast, 20g salt (Maldon sea salt), mixed for 5 minutes with a KitchenAid using the dough hook, and left for a couple of hours to do its thing. We’re getting our yeast from Sainsbury’s bread counter – I prefer this to EasyBake yeast but I’m sure I couldn’t tell the difference in the final bread!
The tiled preparation counter we built worked a treat – basic granite-based floor tiles with an Epoxy based grout to prevent bacteria and grunge build-up. After cleaning the surface we then used it for making and serving the pizzas – at least until the thunder rumbles converted to rain! Thankfully the small amount of rain was short-lived so we got to spend all afternoon making, serving and eating pizza. I even managed to persuade a couple of people to try a salami pizza with a couple of drops of our ‘Inferno’ chilli sauce, for which I wore latex gloves to avoid contaminated the remainder of the pizzas! Only a couple of people suffered so I didn’t feel too guilty.
I think we made around 25-30 pizzas, using around 3.5kg of dough, and was pleased to find the oven hot enough to start burning them to punish my lack of attention in the first 20 minutes. Once I’d got on top of things the pizzas were taking around 2-3 minutes to cook, including time to pull them out a couple of times for a quick turn. Most of them had a passata thinly spread with the back of a spoon, followed by salami for the meat eaters, then fresh basil leaves (torn), ground pepper, shredded mozzarella, a little grated cheddar, and a drizzle of olive oil.
A couple of hours after the last pizzas were made, and the fire had gone out, we checked the temperature and found it was around 280C (536f). An hour later we popped in a tray of sausages and oven chips, and 20 minutes later had an unexpected feast of chip buttys with sausages!
I don’t think we’d be able to bake bread the morning after a pizza session as the temperature would probably be below 200C. So my next task is to beef up the insulation on the door (currently a simple steel door), and also add a layer of insulation underneath the oven floor.
Next Friday we have some friends coming over again, and this time we’re hoping to use the oven to cook some beef on the bone marinaded in herbs and tomatoes. We may also use some pasta rice, as recommended by the man in the Italian deli in Worcester. Not sure what it is, nor how to use it, but when I told him we had an outdoor wood-fired oven his eyes lit up and he recounted some stories of childhood cooking back home in Italy which left me totally inspired to use the oven for more than just pizza!
Until next time, Buon Appetito.
Shad's Pad 