Had some friends last night – the ones that helped me build the foundation/base of the oven – and we fired the oven up and made the first pizza’s! We also had some tasty bourbon and beers 🙂
For toppings, I put out bowls of :
- fresh basil
- fresh rosemary
- hot chorizo sausage
- bacon
- oven roasted red onion
- oven roasted red pepper
- smoked gruyere
- pecorino
- bocconcini
- a tomato sauce (with olive oil, salt & pepper, garlic)
- and some olive oil to drizzle over the pizzas prior to sliding them into the oven.
Worked great having a few wooden pizza peels for everyone to prepare their pizza’s on.
Learnt a few things :
- Be fairly liberal with the cornmeal on the pizza peels.
- Don’t prepare the pizza’s too far in advance of getting them into the oven.
- Keep your eye on the edges closest to the coals.
- I need some more tools to manage the fire and coals, as well as manipulate the pizza’s while in the oven. Tools with longer handles!
- Need to set up some sort of rack/shelf near the oven to keep tools and heat proof gloves handy.
Also, I think that I’ll be reworking the oven entrance, and remove the 3 fire bricks. In their place, I want to put in a larger, single slab of granite or soapstone.