Thursday, October 13th, GoreMade Pizza made their first mobile wood fired public appearance. It was a complete success!
The company I work for does a catered event for our department twice a year or so, with random pizza orderings in between. There's some partnership they have with Donato's Pizza and that's usually what's on the menu. The discussions were coming up for what to serve this time around instead of the same old pizza. This was about the time I found my love for wood fired pizza, and buying a wood fired oven was on my short list of things to do. After the purchase of the oven and going through the chain of approval, which is a dizzying process for anything in a corporate environment, I finally got the go-ahead. Since I have not yet been inspected by the health department, It is illegal for me to charge money for food. So my department paid for the ingredients and I put it all together free of charge (although I was on the clock for 5 hours on pizza day!) Have you ever gotten so excited about something that it couldn't possibly live up to your anticipation of it? That was the first pizza sunday with my new oven.
For some reason, I imagined my first wood fired experience to be nothing less than perfection from the very beginning. Let me ruin the suspense by telling you that it was indeed less than perfection. We got some delicious food, don't get me wrong. But there were definitely quite a few set-backs and burnt edges. Firing a wood oven is something I probably should have put more time and research into before trying it on my own. Lets just say that the assumed 45 minute warm-up time was a little ambitious for a first timer! It took nearly 2 hours to get the oven to what I understood to be "temperature" (sort of a blind-leading-the-blind destination in and of itself). The position of the fire is key to properly distributing heat evenly. And burning thick bark is not good. After that all got ironed out, it was still a little rocky, but at least we made it out with the oven "working"! |
AuthorNick Gore was a corporate peon by day who just made the leap to full time pizza geek. Follow his path to world class Pizzaiolo right here on the GoreMade Pizza blog. Archives
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