Pizza

I love pizza.  I was raised on Chicago style deep dish pizza and I still love that once in a while.  However over the years I've become more enamored of Neapolitan style pizza.  I don't leave the dinner or lunch table feeling so heavy.  There's something just so fun about a personal pizza.  So I was thrilled when I came home to an early mother's day gift from my husband, the OONI 3 portable pizza oven.  

We stumbled upon this at our local hardware store and found multiple videos showing how to use it.  It didn't look that hard, and honestly it wasn't.  I would highly suggest you purchase an infrared thermometer if you plan to cook pizza this way.  The pellet-burning oven gets hot, really hot.  Not too much after 10 minutes of burning we had a temperature of 700 plus degrees. 

Of course I had to try the pizza oven last night.  The weather was perfect and it's supposed to rain all week so Sunday was it.  I used my typical pizza dough.  This was my big mistake as the dough really was too wet.  We had trouble transferring the dough to the paddle from a cookie sheet. I've done some more research and I really should make the pizza directly on the paddle and use a drier dough for the crust.  I might as well try the Ooni recipe and see what happens next time.  We had to use a lot, really a lot, of cornmeal to keep the dough from sticking. 

However after about 60 -90 seconds and my husband turning the pizzas every 20 seconds this was the result.

Pizza margherita, with fresh mozzarella, local hot house tomatoes and basil as well. 

Sausage and pepperoni with fresh mozzarella and tomato sauce.  Both were delicious so we are going to try later in the week.  I placed an order for the OO flour from amazon, and I'll use a different recipe for the dough so we'll see what happens.  It's always fun to try something new.

Bon Appétit!

and as always with love from the Midwest, 

Beth