Pizza ovens

Thanks for the detail - yeah I thought the rolling pin was a no no but might give it a shot

Thanks, a fair amount of the "traditional" NY Slices are rolled from what I see but I'd take a Neapolitan over them any day, it was worth it for a change. It allowed for a much bigger pizza and the longer cook made for a firm base.

The kids weren't overly impressed so it's back to Neapolitan. God help them when they get served up a Dominos.

Save yourself €20 and buy a BBQ brush for €5! 🙄

There's a button underneath the on/off switch. You have to press it in with your finger relatively firmly but the top just pops off once you do.

The Ferrari G3 oven (black) is currently on Amazon Italy for €79.99 + VAT + shipping €15.01 = €95.66 delivered

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.

I believe most SuperValus stock it...

It's a weird one alright - it didn't happen when we first got the dough, not that I can remember, or if it did there were only small patches of crust, so maybe it's the dough. Shame as we still have about 30 of them to get through!! I'll try another frozen dough this week to see how that works out.

Dobbies are offering 20% off Ooni and accessories at the moment. They are a UK company but have a branch in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. They don't seem to do click and collect but if you phoned the branch they might hold items for collection if they're in stock. The Store Manager was extremely helpful to me last year when trying to source a Koda oven.

Not sure if you are in Dublin or not but this place sells a lot of BBQ wood https://aroomoutside.ie/collections/fuels-wood-pellets I dont know what their delivery costs are.

Also look on Donedeal, iirc there was a shop there last year selling various woods for BBQ and pizza ovens

Alternatively you could go into Woodes/B&Q and buy a bag of kiln dried hardwood. You'd have to chop it yourself with an axe though which could be tricky/cumbersome to get it down to size to fit into the Karu

Great post - didn't foresee the twist at the end!

I did a fair bit of research at one point into building an oven, and settled on the gym ball method too, so I'm glad to see it worked out for you (even if you did end up moving!). I think I'll always have my ooni, but there's something appealing about the real job - and supposedly they are great for slow cooking stuff over night once you've finished making pizzas. Anyway, thanks again for sharing - great job.

Thanks. I actually get wood for the fire from them but wasn't sure if it would be ok for the pizza oven.

Do you get the logs and chop them yourself? Or just use their kindling?

Ive a Fyra so just use the pellets

As in the new 16 sized one? If so, none. I read a post on FB yesterday from an Ooni rep saying it will be excluded from Black Friday deals. I'll see if I can find it.

Thanks - was looking more at the Karu 12 (hard to see why there is such a difference in price between the 12 and the 16). I'll sign up to the newsletter as they suggest

The only one I’ve used is Aldi’s Sourdough and it’s just so easy. Load your peel, no semolina/flour needed. Put on your toppings but keep it as light as possible. All raw toppings should be cooked beforehand. Try and dehydrate your mozzarella, using kitchen roll, to keep moisture away from on your base.

Turn every 20 seconds or so.

You can pump out a lot of pizzas in one sitting very quickly using pre baked bases and the quality is very good.

Ive used the Sorrento bases that Aldi (2.50) and Supervalu (3.99) sell. They are perfectly acceptable and great if you want pizza that night but didnt make a batch of dough in advance. The texture of crust obviously isnt going to be as airy and chewy as using fresh dough but they are still decent enough. If I was having a party and had to make a lot of pizzas Id probably use them as they save a lot of time when theres lots of hungry mouths about.

Perforated peels are definitely easier to use but they're not magic either. You can still have issues if you've put too much sauce on etc. And if you're not comfortable lifting the pizza onto the peel, a non perforated one might be better... I.e if you have to top the base while it's on the perforated peel then the dough can sink into the holes from the pressure when applying the sauce and other toppings.

I got one from AliExpress for €15, it's absolutely perfect, Ooni accessories are daylight robbery imo.

Will this do for making my pizza dough, completely new to this

Panasonic SD-YR2550SXC Breadmaker with Horizontal Design and Yeast Dispenser - Silver https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B093T7F1YP/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_T5GGPBMSD768XM193V3Z

It has a pizza dough setting on it so yes. Though you can do it all by hand, there is no real need for a breadmaker perhaps unless you would find use for it making other things like bread and cakes. GBP200 is a fair wedge to spend when its not truly necessary. If you are buying it though its currently at its highest price likely becasue it will be discounted for Black Friday in a few weeks time. It was GBP169 a few weeks ago so they probably raised it so they can drop it again for Black Friday.

This is the recipe and technique Im currently working off and it makes excellent pizza all by hand. Its about 20 minutes active work mixing and kneading the dough. You'll find step by step instructions in the video description on Youtube. Its important to follow them to the letter and try to get fresh yeast from an Eastern European shop, they all sell it for about 50 cents a block.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Hd6ZzKgBM&t=7s

You’re going to need (pardon the pun!) a top notch mixer, like a KichenAid or Kenwood, that will be able to cope with making dough and that is going to set you back way more than a bread maker…..