Pizza!

Here it is, the first pizza to come from the oven. This is the payoff from five months of weekends working on the oven and it was all worth it. I could do with a better food stylist for the pictures, though. This was a basic cheese, tomato and mushroom pizza, by the way.

It doesn't look great, partially because it had already been attacked by the resident pizza monsters that hang around my house. But I will point out a key attribute from a wood fired oven pizza - slight charring on the rim and browned edges. You can't tell from the picture but it had the crunch on the crust that I had not been able to achieve with my regular oven.

The most satisfying part of this is that it came out good and I know what to work on to make it better. If the first pizza had been a total disaster that would have been a major let down. As it was, the pizzas got better as the night wore on.

Anchovies with Cheese and Tomato

More Anchovies and cheese. This was actually one of the better pizzas of the night, nicely browned edges, even cooking. Practice makes perfect I guess.

I made eight pizzas tonight, more than I have ever done before. Because the oven performed so well, it was quite easy. With the high temperatures the pizzas cooked in 5 minutes or less, depending on how hot it was. Peak temperature in the oven was over 800 degrees.

Overall, things are performing as expected. It takes about an hour to get to cooking temperature and it looks like it will hold the temperature well. When I quit for the evening, the bricks were still registering a temperature of over 500 degrees Farenheit after the fires had been banked and it was just the coals inside.

I am quite happy with the first pizza run. I've made some mental notes on things to improve on to get even better results. It is so satisfying to have things work out fine after working on this since July, not knowing how it would come out.

Pizza day has finally arrived and it was a success!