Pizza Party!

Once you have built your own pizza oven, you’ve got to have a pizza party! We keep it simple, ultra thin margarita pizzas and some farinata with loads of salads! This weekend we had thirty, cooked thirty pizzas and then sat around our new fire pit!

Production line!

Production line!

– We made 3.5kg of dough using two 1.5kg bags of strong flour and 600g of semolina which gave a fantastic texture to the bases

Smoking Hot!

Smoking Hot!

I was pretty nervous about cooking so many pizzas – would the oven stay hot enough long enough? To make sure, I fired it for 6 hours, so the outside was hand hot! We used an air bed blower attached to a length of copper pipe to make sure air was reaching the wood at the back, so that red hot embers covered the entire base of the oven. I put the last wood in an hour before so that it would be just embers!

By 6o’clock we were ready and our thin Italian style pizzas took 90secs each to cook

Fantastico

Fantastico

We were so pleased with the result and our new 9″ Black Iron pizza pans from ebay – the depth means you don’t get ash on the pizzas! Black iron is just the name for them – they go black after seasoning with oil and some use. If you get some of these pans, wash them in warm soapy water, wipe them with vegetable oil and bake them in the oven until the oil burns into the pans – that’s called sasoning and makes them pretty non-stick! I then brush a little olive oil before spreading the dough on them – a tennis ball size piece spread out makes a great thin base! Then a spoonful of tomato sauce (whizzed chopped tomatoes and gralic reduced by half in a pan) and plenty of grated mozarella cheese – Fantastico!

30 pizzas cooked and eaten in 30mins!

30 pizzas cooked and eaten in 30mins!

We tend to cook and cut the pizzas into quarters and serve on the salad table, rather than cooking individually topped pizzas to order – with 30 hungry mouths, it’s quicker that way and more Italian! We use the excellent Scizza pizza cutter* to cut them! They are an ingeneous pair of scissors specially designed for pizza cutting!

We then made some nutella pizzas cook some plain bases, spread with nutella, drizzle with some maple syrup and sprinkle with chopeed pistachio – no photos they were eaten too fast!

Jamming by the fire pit!

Jamming by the fire pit!

As it got darker, we lit our new fire pit and some instruments appeared for a jam session! I’d learnt from an American the best way to light a firepit – build a jenga out of wood with gaps, then put the kindling on top and light from the top. The air flow from underneath means there is little smoke and it rises too!

What a great evening we had!



Why not get your own Sicily firepit (by stovescentral on Amazon.co.uk*) and plan your next pizza party


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