A Tuscany adventure - #7, Fire!, Making pizza

Fire!

So, at last we fired up the new pizza oven. My friends Tage and Sissel here in Montemagno in Tuscany have had a new pizza oven built in their garden, and we just fired it up for the first time. An oven like this is fired with wood and reaches 400 degrees Celsius and more. At this temperature it is ready for pizzas.  We had been told that olive wood was the only correct thing to use and we had procured some of that.

Since this was a brand new oven, we had been told that we needed to heat it slowly the first time, so we started with a small fire that got the oven up to 100 degrees in twenty minutes or so. The door of the oven has a thermometer so that it is possible to measure the temp in there. After building successively larger fires, we eventually reached 400 after about three hours. We pushed the fire to one side, cleared the other side and we were ready for the first pizza.

First pizza going in!

Here is how to make pizza, according to the locals:

The dough is made into a circle with the edge a bit thicker than the rest of the pizza. Tomato sauce is added. This should be just peeled tomatoes, crushed (with an immersion blender in our modern world), and salt and pepper added if you want to. It should not be cooked in any way.

Then add all un-cooked toppings: mushrooms, uncooked sausage (which we used), onions, cheese etc. This goes in the oven. After 2-3 minutes, the pizza was cooked. Then take it out and add any other toppings like cured ham, ruccula etc. Then in again just to warm this, and the pizza is ready.

The first pizza was perfect! Nice crust and all. The next one, however, did not cook properly, and checking the temp, we found that it had dropped significantly. We had to do put on some more logs and make sure the temp got up again. When the oven is hot enough, the inner wall of stones should be all white. This time we made sure they were, and we pushed the fire to the back of the oven. This seemed to work better and the temp kept up for the rest of the evening.

After a few more trials, Tage and Sissel will probably offer pizza evenings through their company SiToscana. I can absolutely recommend it!