Pizza ovens
Comments
-
-
-
-
Have been moving away from Neapolitan style pizzas and have been trying a few NY style ones. Tried to replicate Lucalis pizza in my latest attempt. Neapolitan still a winner for me but it was nice for a change.
Managed to get a quick snap before the kids pounced.
8 -
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
Thanks, it's certainly different than the normal Neapolitan. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole when it came to trying to replicate it (Lucali's supposedly the best Pizzeria in NY, plenty of YouTube videos out there but no definite recipe).
500g Caputo Pizzeria
280-300g Room Temp Water (I've started to use bottled over tap)
20g / Small glug of Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1g instant yeast
15g salt
Dissolve salt into water and then add the EVOO, add about 10-20% of the flour and mix until like a pancake batter. Add yeast and mix with fingers for a minute or so before adding remaining flour gradually. Dough should be a relatively dry one.
Once all combined I kneeded for 5mins, let rest for 15mins. And repeated that process another 2 times.
Lightly oil a bowl, cover and let bulk rise for 2 hours at RT.
Individually ball and leave at room temperature for 6 hours. (I was going to put it in the fridge for 24hr at this point but....pizza needed to get in my belly)
He rolls out his dough with a bottle of wine so, as strange as it felt, I got the rolling pin to the dough and rolled it out very thin and then worked it with hands for the final bit.
Cooked in the Ooni 16, I turned off the flame as soon as I launched pizza for 90 seconds and then put the flame on low for another 90 seconds.
Above recipe does 3 X 300g balls and they were rolled out to just under 16 inch pizzas.
(I spent 5 hours simmering the sauce as per their supposed method, it was nice but ott imo)
Three cheese, 1 block of Tesco low moisture mozzarella finely sliced 70%, shreeded buffalo mozzarella 30% and then parmesan once out of the oven.
Pic added of Lucali pizza, think I got close enough in appearance but who knows if it tasted any way similar.
Edit: corrected water amount
Post edited by PARlance on5 -
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
Apologies in advance for the long post but I want to share my own pizza oven journey with you all.
During lockdown 1.0 my wife and I decided to get our hands dirty and do a massive job on our garden. It was overdue and involved putting in 25 tonnes of topsoil, planting hedges and trees and building a flagstone patio area. We decided to do all the work ourselves.
I had been making my own pizza dough for a while and cooking on a stone in our fan oven. Results were decent but never pizzeria quality.
So I took the opportunity to build a wood fired pizza oven and bbq area.
I needed it to be as cheap as possible so I found a series of YouTube videos on how to build a vermiculite oven for £70 and followed those instructions. Here is the first in that series of videos:
Now my budget ended up quite a bit over his ninety odd euro, mostly because I didn't have some of the scrap stuff he used and during lockdown gym balls seemed to be rarer than hen's teeth so it cost a good bit to get an adequately sized ball on Amazon.
I started by building the BBQ first. I bought a pallet of bricks and a "Bricky" tool. I got a brick bbq set from Argos online. Having never done any brick laying before, this was a real challenge and by the end of this whole process I'd done enough of it that I would rather never lay another brick again!
In this picture you can see the finished BBQ and the layout for the pizza oven base and a preparation area beside the BBQ. The slate is just sitting on top of the BBQ, that will become a worktop later.
Here is the picture of the oven "mould" ready for concrete.
And here is the oven after covering the mould in vermiculite concrete:
I decided not to bother doing the false brick effect on the dome, as is done in the video instructions. Instead I decided to paint the finished dome with high temperature paint after the outer layer of regular cement had been applied. I also decided to add a layer of fire brick slips on the base in a herringbone pattern. Felt it would be better to cook on than the concrete.
The next part of the build involved lots and lots of brick laying. So much in fact that I got sick of it, and once I had the base for the oven finished, I left it like that for about 6 months before I finally built the willpower to finish the prep area and decorative aspects of the oven. Here are a couple of shots of the base mid-build.
With the oven ready to go (apart from building up the flue and decorative work) I decided to try it out.
After some proving fires and no signs of cracking I lit a big fire and got cooking.
Apart from the fact that the lack of a flue made it a rather smoky experience at first, the pizzas came out great. I have a cheap infra red thermometer and it was going off scale at about 450 degrees c. Need to put a log on the fire about every half hour or so to keep it hot enough for pizza.
The first pizza I made in the oven...
To be honest it was a bit underwhelming so I put more effort into my dough recipe. I bought 00 flour and that made a world of difference. I used this website https://www.stadlermade.com/pizza-dough-calculator/ to get a recipe for Neapolitan dough. The results were much better.
It's made some absolutely top notch pizzas, and I'm glad that I went through the effort in the end!
Here is the whole project finished:
All in the project probably cost around €800, most of that cost being the bricks. And now the sad part... we decided to move so we sold the house 🤣
I might go down this road again in the future but in the medium term I'll probably get an Ooni or similar.
28 -
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
