The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #164818   Message #3949921
Posted By: theleveller
12-Sep-18 - 10:46 AM
Thread Name: BS: You are what you eat?
Subject: RE: BS: You are what you eat?
I've been making pizza at home for years and eventually realised that it's just not possible to cook a really good one in a domestic oven (despite experiments with cast iron plates, slabs of granite and terracotta platters). So I finally bit the bullet and bought a small catering oven which fits in a cupboard and reached 350C ( not as hot as I'd like but it does the job).

I've also built a wood oven using an oil drum (worked fine until the wooden frame collapsed from the weight of the concrete covering) and I've also constructed several wood-fired cob ovens for different people - which are very low cost but need a gang of people to tread the cob. These work beautifully, get really hot and can last several years if you keep the rain off. Here's a pic of one I built at a community allotment in Hull. It's still going strong (I'm the grubby one on the left).
Cob Oven under construction

I sometimes use sourdough for the pizza base, as I make sourdough bread twice a week, and this sound like the pizza that Steve Shaw mention having in Naples, but mostly I prefer a slow risen conventional yeast dough. Nothing, though, will ever be as good as the ones they serve on the first floor of the Central Market in Florence!