Berserkers,
Fellow board member Dylan Provencer and his lovely wife Chelsea held a wine and food gathering last night to commemorate the second of their two recent new babies. The first being their recently newborn second son and the second being their brand new outdoor wood burning pizza oven! For this afternoon gathering, we all brought wine while Dylan and Chelsea provided the pizza doughs, sauces and toppings for people to play with as well as lessons on how to properly make pizza in a wood burning stove. I’ll summarize the wines, the pizzas, the techniques and even share some recipes that people came up with over the course of the evening.
The great thing about pizza is that it is actually quite a complex food and plays equally well with red, white and even sweet wines depending on how you top it. For the event, Dylan made his own pizza dough and tomato sauce but also purchased some pre-made doughs just to make sure there was enough to go around for the evening. They provided an abundance of cheeses including shredded and cubed mozzarella, parmesan and feta and board member Michael Grammer provided some blue cheeses smuggled in from the US as well. You didn’t hear that from me, though. For toppings we had a ton of veggie and protein options including zucchini, red peppers, red onions, cremini and Japanese Inoki mushrooms, potatoes, raw and cured sausages, ground beef, and chicken. Mike G. also brought some Moroccan lamb. We also had some nice bottled pesto as well.
Dylan started the event off with a basic Margherita pizza. Then he got us all to make our own pizzas and how to cook them in the wood burning oven. Some important points for your pizza making from Dylan:
• First, you need tools: A couple of pizza peels (aka pizza spatulas). One is for “launching” the pizza into the blazing hot oven and the other is for “spinning” it and retrieving it from the oven. At least one heat-proof silicon glove for protection. A wooden cutting board for the finished pizzas. And of course a pizza slicer.
• The launching peel must be liberally covered with flour so the raw pizza doesn’t stick to it. Unless you like watching all your toppings and sauce fly off the pizza onto the oven floor when you try to launch it into the oven as the dough remains behind stuck to the peel.
• Under no circumstances should one touch any part of either the blazing oven or even the hot pizza itself with their hands or any other part of their body. Use silicon heat resistant oven mitts at all time while handing until ready to cut and serve.
• Once launched into the oven, you have to “spin” the pizza using a peel repeatedly as you can risk burning a side of the pizza by overexposing it to the heat. All sides of the pizza should be as evenly exposed as possible.
• The oven can reach up to 500 – 700 degrees Celsius which is hot enough to actually keep the pizza cooking itself even after you completely remove it from the oven! So if you think it’s underdone, you might be surprised a few minutes later when it’s completely cooked through. Better to judge by how the pizza sides are done than how the bottom is done.
• The sides of the pizza will cook faster than the bottom (although the bottom will cook quite rapidly as well). So if you want to cook the bottom a bit more, you need to lift the pizza with the peel and expose the bottom to the heat more before retrieving.
We had some delicious combinations, not all of which I managed to record (although I managed to pretty much taste every one) but I will share as many different ones as I documented in my notes.
• Tomato sauce and mozzarella (basic Margherita) optionally touched with fresh basil leaves
• Tomato sauce, mozzarella and mushrooms
• Tomato sauce, mozzarella, ground beef, Inoki mushrooms, bacon, hot peppers
• Mozarella, Parmesan, hot peppers, red onions and zucchini
• Cured sausage, mushrooms, onions and mozzarella
• Taco pizza: exactly what it sounds like, Tex-Mex cheese blend, ground beef, salsa, hot peppers
• Pesto, Burrata cheese, quail eggs, and fresh basil leaves
• Pesto, potato slices and fresh basil leaves
• Nutella and fresh raspberries
• Nutella and fresh strawberries
I did take a crack at the pizzas and am proud to say that I actually did spin my dough in the air. This actually made the dough a bit too thin which became a little problematic with the vegetarian pizza board member Jay Shampur and I worked on together (the fourth recipe above) as I was trying to spin it in the oven, resulting in more of an oval pizza than a round one. Otherwise, everyone else did a great job with their pizzas. It’s very cool seeing the pizza both rise and darken in the oven in the span of a mere few minutes. Next time we have to do some spatchcocked chicken, Calzones, and poached fruits for dessert.