Chocolate Pizza and More!

It was pretty busy today for the oven. Since I did some work on the oven earlier this week, I had to hold off doing any cooking (The heat from oven would mess up the setting of the concrete) for the past few days.

But today we did a regular batch of dough for three pizzas and I also prepared for baguettes. I made the pizza dough in advance two days ago so it was ready to go. The baguettes, though, took the whole morning to prepare.

Baguette dough is a multi-step recipe requiring a starter dough, which is prepared in advance. The starter needs a one hour warm up after coming from the ref. After mixing with more flour, it needs a two hour rise. After rolling and forming the baguettes, they need another 45 mins to an hour to proof before baking. From start to ready to bake, its about four hours. Baking, thankfully, only takes ten minutes.

In between waiting for the baguette dough to rise, I also prepared pizza for lunch. Since the oven had to be fired up anyway, may as well make pizza! We had a cheese and tomato pizza and an italian sausage pizza to go along with lunch. I still had dough left for one more and we were all done eating so I decided to go do something I had always wanted to try: dessert pizza. After checking what we had in the kitchen to work with, I settled on chocolate with apples and pears pizza.

Now you may not think of pizza as dessert but it actually works pretty well. Very much like a crepe, it's just a base for anything you want to put. So we grated some semi sweet baking chocolate and put that on the dough. It was topped with apple and pear slices, a sprinkling of cinammon and another layer of grated chocolate. The kids got involved so we had to put Nuttela and peanut butter, too!



The result was quite yummy. It was gooey and went really well with ice cream. We ran out of vanilla but strawberry worked fine. The peanut butter burns really quick, so we won't have that next time. But the chocolate melted just like mozarella cheese and the apples and pears were still firm.



Oh, and the baguettes came out very tasty, too. Better than the last time, but still needs a little more tweaking. Nice crust on the bottom, but the top needed more browning. I need to work on the oven temperature and the dough consistency.

Prettying Up the Oven

Spent most of the holidays doing finishing work on the oven. Some functional work, but mostly cosmetic touches on the oven. The main task this time was to fix up the front of the oven to make it look more presentable. Here are the before and after pictures.









On the left is the before - what the front has looked like since I started using the oven for cooking. It is rough and unfinished. On the right is the completed finishing work. I lined the sides with brick tiles and created a arch over the oven entrance in an attempt to soften the look of the oven. I will probably paint over the rough concrete just to get away from the ugly gray finish, too.


These are work in progress pictures, showing the stages of construction before the completed work. Notice the use of wood scaffolding to hold up the arch as the concrete sets.













One other improvement I did on the oven was to put a vent on the top of the chimney. This sends most of the smoke away from the house. It will also help keep the rain out of the oven. The vent is the concrete addition on top of the chimney bricks, it is open on the other side to let the smoke out.



While the oven is more presentable now, there is still more work to be done. Next up on the job list is to put brick tiles on the sides and the front of the oven base. I estimate this will take about two weekends of work to complete. The problem, as always, is finding the time to schedule the work. If I cook, I don't have time to work on it. If I do brick work, I can't cook for a few days while the cement dries up. My preference, of course, is to cook! Then we get to eat pizza!

Baguettes!

I know its been ages since I've posted, but since I started cooking there haven't been any major developments. When I'm baking pizza, I can't work on the oven. And lately, all I've been doing has been baking. But today the big development was baguette success. My attempt at baking wood fired bread came out pretty good. They were nicely browned and the insides were soft (though a tad bit chewy). Needs some work with getting a good thick crust (higher temperature I think) and more flavor as this one came out a bit bland. However, these came out nice so I just need to tweak the recipe a bit.

Now, I need to decide if I should work on the oven next week or bake again. Sigh. Decisions, decisions!

You might be wondering what else needs to be done, now that the oven is fully operational. Its actually mostly aesthetics, but will make the whole thing look nice. From the picture below, you can see that the outer cement coat is complete, it just needs a coat of paint. I need to get that done before the rains start to complete the waterproofing of the oven. I also plan to line the base of oven with brick tiles, since its just plain concrete now.


The main work I want to accomplish is to fix the front of the oven. As you can see below it is still very rough. I plan to put smooth coat of concrete in front and line it with brick tiles to give it a more finished look.


And just so you know, the pizza is still great. I've been experimenting with flour combinations and length of kneading time, to try and get a light dough with crunch. At this point, I am partial to a 50/50 blend of regular bread flour and 00 Italian pizza flour. I plan to try using 100% 00 flour one more time. I did this back when I was just baking in a regular oven and was not happy with the results. But with the wood fired oven and higher temperatures it just might work out.

So I'll leave you with my favorite pizza - Margherita (basic cheese with tomatoes and a sprinkling of fresh basil leaves).