Believe it or not, but I almost bailed on pizza…
My husband and I love cooking and became obsessed with making pizza when we moved to LA in 2013. We started first with buying dough from Bay Cities in Santa Monica (shout out!) and read up on how to make pizza in a regular home kitchen oven. As the years passed we made a pretty solid pizza in our oven at full blast heat on a pizza stone. We then got a pizza peel and there was a moment where we would get highly stressed trying to get the dough to not stick to the peel. Highly stressed is an understatement, actually. We watched so many YouTube videos on how to perfect the technique that we became armed with so much knowledge that we didn’t know what to do with.
All this knowledge went out the door when we transferred to a small wood burning pizza oven. Oh the rage I felt when trying to keep that fire alive. We really didn’t know what we were getting into. We eventually bailed on this pizza oven, maintaining the fire while also having such a small area to put the pizza (our peel didn’t even fit into the opening of the oven) just didn’t work.
Cut to: Ooni. We got an Ooni pizza oven and we thought: finally! The perfect summer experience was here. We can have a delicious meal with out making our entire house a literal hotbox. We got some doughs from Eataly and started to make pizzas, however the pizzas kept coming out with totally charred on the crust and doughy in the center. WHY? I was so frustrated. It took more than a few tries for me to realize that I needed to make my own dough. Using pre-made dough was always difficult and it was challenging to gauge where it was in the rise (Over-proofed? Under-proofed? We may never know). Shaping the dough required all of my patience as it always would tear or be totally resistant to stretch. I tried a few recipes with commercial yeast and the dough was just not flavorful and overall lacking.
I finally tried out the wood-fired dough recipe from The Perfect Loaf using my sourdough starter and got an infrared thermometer to understand the heat I was working with and I can say it is now perfect! The dough actually has integrity, it can be stretched thin while also being so pillowy soft. And we feel like we are in control of the heat rather than it being in control of us. I can now have the creative awakening I’ve always dreamed of- garlic confit pizza? Yes please. Chive blossoms on top? Absolutely. Momofuku chili crisp? A done deal.
Let hot pizza summer commence!
