It Took Me 368 Days To Make This Homemade Pizza (Oven) | Claire Saffitz

Did you turn it on? It's on but there's like two key positions, okay, now it's off. Oh, why isn't anything happening? Oops, hello everyone. I'm Claire Saffitz, welcome to what's the beginning of my outdoor kitchen that I built myself. Cal helped me a lot. Oh my god, thank you,

this

is so heavy. I have no idea what I'm doing. I should probably say that first I just like reading a lot of stuff on the internet and watching a lot of YouTube videos. What could go wrong today? I'm taking my

oven

outside because it's made in Voyage.

I'm very excited and also super nervous Harris. I'm so nervous. What is it about the girl Julie? The courage of your conversation. Yes, thanks, that's helpful. I've never done

this

before and I'm going to do it.

make

some

pizza

on it, seriously, it's okay, it looks like raw dough, it's like I'm not reinventing the wheel here, I just want to see if the

oven

works, I don't know, there are some cracks we'll see anyway, fingers crossed for the first bake in the oven I'm going to choose a Neapolitan style

pizza

. I'm not really like Reinventing the Wheel here, sort of classic neolan style dough, a little bit of tomato sauce, a little bit of mozzarella, nothing fancy, I just want it to work with this particular style.

The oven is really designed for baking bread, it has this beautiful dome, it has a door that is a very specific height relative to the height of the dome, where you get this type of induction heating with the air flow, but you can still

make

pizza in it, pizza ovens are actually less technical, you can make something flatter with a larger opening, so it's super versatile, you can make pizza, you can make bread, you can make anything you put in the oven from your house. bakes cookies here and you know, vegetables, so I'm really excited. I feel like this is really going to change the way we live in this space, but there is a big learning curve.

I enjoyed reading a lot about this for hours and hours. and hours without mentioning the actual construction of it. I really want it to work. I started this building process 370

days

ago, it was right before the Welser dessert came out, that was last year in November. I thought I had to start this oven project sooner. the ground freezes, so at the end of October I dug a huge hole, rented a mini avator EX, and then went on a huge hiatus all winter, book tour and all. I was away for a long time and then I picked it up again in the spring and summer, so I built a foundation, laid concrete bricks, poured a concrete slab on top, designed it to have wood storage underneath, that was very important for me to keep everything dry, then I built an insulation bed and then I put the brick, the refractory brick for the floor of the kiln created a big dome of sand which was the shape, then I built this kind of mixture of clay, mud and sand in a dome around it, I built a brick arch and then you have a furnace I put a chimney in actually I still have more work to do, it's not quite finished, it's very rough looking and a bit ugly so I'll like the stucco on it base.

I'm going to add a layer of plaster to the outside, so it's super smooth, that helps make it a little more waterproof and I have to build a roof, it's not like it can't be exposed to moisture or rain, so I would do it again if I really fully understood how much I like it. This was going to take a lot of time and research and, frankly, money. I don't know the point, but I built it, so here we are and I love it and I'm very proud of it and I learned a lot, but this was a lot of work I think this oven is getting hot, the dome is hot to the touch the top of the insulation, so you know it takes several hours to turn it on, literally.

One thing that is happening is that there is a breeze blowing. In this direction and the breeze is actually like taking oxygen away from the fire so I'm going to put something called a firing door where I'm basically going to close off a lot of the opening but I'm going to leave a gap at the bottom so it can draw in air and there's this guy system based on the way the fire moves and, like the Dome, where it will suck air in at the bottom, drag it back, go up to the top of the Dome and then we go up the chimney, so that's the kind of air flow so you know we've been.

I mean, Vinnie and Cal started the fire without me while I was inside as SP for a few hours, so I hope we're almost there. at that temperature I want it to be I would love it if it was around 700 800 it's really better for pizza but I'd be very happy with 700 even 600 I just wanted to go over 600 maybe a quick note one thing I learned in this process is like it doesn't really If it were to reach these really high temperatures until everything is super dry and it's not dry yet, it takes quite a few firings to dry it out, so it might not all get there.

I want you to know what, let me check. my goal I just want it to get hotter than my indoor oven can reach, so 550+ new goals. I keep lowering my expectations, but I think we can do it while I have my fire in a really good place. I show you how I made the dough, how I made the sauce, and I really hope we make some pizza here, so before I get into the dough recipe, I want to thank our friends at King Arthur Baking Company based in Vermont. King Arthur is the oldest flower in the United States. company, all wheat flour is grown and melted in the USA and if anyone has seen any dessert episodes, you know that King Arthur is my flour of choice for all my baked goods, from cookies to cakes to breads, they have a full line of flowers, even gluten free and I also use bread flour for all my breads, it is high in protein making it the most beautiful chewy open crumb bread.

Today I am using double zero flour, which I am very excited about. About this, it is a mixture of hard and soft wheat flour, it is specially formulated for Neapolitan style pizza dough. You'll get a super bubbly rim and a very thin crust all over the surface, so I'm really excited to use it if you want to learn more about the double zero and all the blooms that King Arthur Baking Company makes, you can go to the link in the description next, so thanks to King Arthur and I'm so excited to make our Neapolitan style pizza dough.

Ideally, pizza should be made with a style of floret called double zero, which refers to the way it is grated in Italy. Double zero is actually a wheat flour that is ground very, very finely and when the flour is fine, it basically allows you to produce a dough. which can be rolled very, very thin and that's what you want with a Neapolitan pie, it's like an ultra thin crust so I have my King Arthur zero flour here and I'm using a recipe with instant yeast and this is a recipe basically taken by Jeffrey Hamil. bread book that is like a Bible for bakers.

I totally trust his formulas and Jeffrey Hilman was also the head baker at King Arthur Flow for years and years and years, so it's definitely a tried and true recipe. I feel like I have enough variables. with the oven I just want something that I know is going to produce a very good result, so I'm going to show you how to make your Neapolitan style pizza dough recipe. It starts with something called AA, which is a style of preer very similar to sourdough. the starter is a preferment, anything that is a portion of the dough that has already been left to ferment with yeast, is added to the dough which is a preferment and Bec is something like an Italian style, so the ingredients for the dough are super simple.

I have my double zero flow I have a little bit of olive oil that goes at the end yeast water with kosher salt that's it, sometimes the neolan style dough doesn't even have oil, but I like a little bit of oil on the pizza dough because helps produce something like a little crispy on the outside special dough equipment you will want a stand mixer for this it is much easier to do in a mixer you need a dough that is fairly well developed, meaning it has a lot of gluten in it so you can stretch something very thin and a pizza oven and the pizza oven and like a peel and gloves and a rake and a bucket and a pile of firewood lighter infrared thermometer your similar number from your local pizzeria that delivers deliveries no It doesn't work so to make this I'm going to start by making the Bea and this is left to ferment overnight and then you use it the next morning to mix the dough.

I have one that I already prepared but I will still show you how. mix it up, so basically a preferment is like a portion of the flour and water from the recipe that you set aside and mix with any similar yeast, whether it's a natural sour starter or instant yeast like the one I'm using and then let it rest . sit down so I'm starting with 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast. I often use active dry, that's how I learn to work with yeast, but I'm slowly migrating to instant yeast because it's more reliable and easier. to use so you could use active dry here although instead of instant the fermentation times will be a little bit different but it basically works the same way so it will go in just a small bowl which I have 1/4 in cup of water, I'm going to give all the amounts in grams that I converted from Jeffy's recipe, which was actually in ounces, I'm just going to add them together to mix with the room temperature water, so there's something called dough temperature desired, which is kind of temperature you want the dough at and it changes depending on the style of dough you're making, but that's the optimal fermentation temperature and for this recipe it's 75 fah, so that's what it's about here, probably a a little fresher, but it should be fine so I add 100 G of flour this is my double zero it's going to go straight in and Bea in terms of pre-ferments it is a fairly hard dough sometimes with a pre-ferment as a sourdough starter or something like that it could be It can be liquid, this is actually more of a dough, so I'm going to work this with my hands and I'm going to mix until it comes together and it's smooth and there's nothing unhydrated. flour, everything came together and I have this kind of shaggy dough, but no unincorporated flour, no dry spots, this is your super simple Bea, so I made it last night and at room temperature around 75, I would say at warm room temperature, the Bea takes depending on the temperature, it takes between 12 and 16 hours to reach that optimal fermentation point, so I put it in a central container and it's been like 13 hours for this Bea, so you can see that it has activated yeast in there.

It's like feeding on starches and flour and is producing gas, so it has grown to a little more than double the size and has a slightly domed surface. I left this on the counter overnight, it's probably between 70 and 75° and depending on the temperature, it will take about 12 to 16 hours to reach the sweet spot where you want to mix it with your dough, so I think my Bea is really ready to go. You can see it expanded and became super bubbly. the surface is slightly domed, that's how you know it's ready, so I'm going to set this aside and now I can use my Bea to mix my final dough.

We're ready, ready to mix the dough because our Bea is basically ready, so I'm I'm going to start by mixing all of my ingredients except the olive oil and Bea in my mixer. I have the hook installed on the mixer. This is a very manageable amount for a

homemade

recipe, so I have my instant yeast, one of the advantages. The best thing about instant yeast is that you don't have to dissolve it first and I often don't even dry dissolve active yeast because the mixing action when you're kneading the dough does it for you, but it's a very convenient yeast to use, so that's that then I have my kosher salt, this is 2% by weight of the total flour, then I'm going to add my liquid, my water and the broom temperature, so I'm going to do this at low speed and as the dough come together I'm going to add my Bea, but in pieces because it's going to be a little firm, so just break it up to help it incorporate into the dough a little easier.

Lots of bubbles below the surface. Super light and voluminous. I hit it and it collapsed a little bit, that's how you know it's ready, look how it's pulling now, look how a crater formed, yeah, that's how you know it's ready, you don't want it to sink on its own, so ya it happened a little bit, but if it's so tall that it can barely support its weight with the little bubbles and then like you hit it it collapses, it's ready, at the perfect time, at low speed, at the lowest speed, so just when the last bit of flour is hydrated, I'm going to start adding. the Bea in like spoonfuls I say that again once again what just happened didn't sound good okay so as the dough comes together I'm going to add the Bea in pieces so I try to prevent it from sticking on its own I don't want to add everything at once because it won't be difficult to incorporate, so I'm just going to pinch up the pieces and put them in the blender.

Wow, put in the last piece, so I'll continue mixing. this at low speed until the dough has come together, it should have a medium development and I'll show you what it looks like, which means there is somekind of visible gluten development and then I'll add my oil, oh I know. What is the problem? The hook is not actually attached. I wondered why it's going so slow. We used it there for the first time. No, here we go. It looks better, yes, and sounds better. It sounds much better too. Oops, so I think maybe. A couple minutes of mixing and then I'll add the oil, but it comes together really well after a few minutes of mixing.

I'll show you what the dough looks like. So, this is a good example of some development, but not full development, kind of in the middle somewhere in the middle, so there's visible gluten here, as you know, when you I pull, there are some strands, but this has to blend more, but I. I'm going to add the oil and the oil is actually going to work against the development of the dough, so after I add the oil, it's going to take a nice, long, pretty slow mixing, maybe 5 minutes or so and then we'll come . Go back and check this will be done in five minutes, mixing maybe a little more 10 10 well, after a long slow mixing, this is what the dough looks like, so see how it's like it's coming off the hook but also It will tear a little. a little bit, so it's kind of a medium development, if it were fully developed it wouldn't really break, but it's also a pretty wet dough.

Now I want to take all of this out of this mixing bowl and onto the counter. I have another bowl here. So now we are entering this phase in bread making called bulk fermentation and that is where you take all the dough dough, sometimes you just make a loaf, so it's called bulk, it's not really a term. handy, but when you're making several different portions of dough in bulk it just means that all the dough is together rather than divided into portions, so I have my scraper here. I just want to get everything out of the bowl and then into this bowl because the dough is pretty sticky.

I'm going to very lightly grease this bowl with a little bit of olive oil just to help prevent it from sticking. I'll see. I'm going to try to gather this into a ball and put it in the bowl of oil. Oil in my hands. Okay, so I'm going to pick up this whole piece of dough and put it in my bowl, so I'm going to cover this bowl. This will keep at room temperature for about an hour. 75° is ideal, but like a couple of degrees. The refrigerator is fine and it's going to start to get a little bubbly and then we'll come back and portion it out and then it can go in the refrigerator so there's a lot of flexibility with timing in the recipe because the dough can stay in there for up to 24 hours so that what you can do is make it in the morning, let it sit in the refrigerator all day and then bake it at night once you have that 1 hour bulk fermentation and then divide the dough and put it in the refrigerator, there it is when you can start heating up the oven and turning it on so the dough has been in that bulk fermentation phase for an hour and has risen.

I looked at it a little sticky, so now I want to divide the dough, I'm going to take it out to my work surface and I'm going to grease it a little so that everything is a little sticky so that it fits my hands well and greased I think with a dough especially a dough where you already have a little olive. You add oil, it's better to use oil than flour as a greasing agent because if you know, you can add flour slowly and then throw things around a little bit, so I have my kitchen scale, so Jeffrey Hamman's recipe says one pound. servings or 16 oz because I am working on an oven that has a relatively small door and is not shaped like a traditional pizza oven which has a short but wide opening.

I think I'm going to make it smaller. I'm going to do it too. to make it smaller because I'm not an expert at manipulating a peel and making the pizza slide off the peel. I think working with something too big would be a big mistake, so I'm going to make 8 oz portions and I'm going to make something like mini pizzas, a good place to start. I guess I don't really know what 8 oz will look like. Look, it's okay. I'm comfortable with that, that's 6.4. I think this is going to be more than enough mass in a serving of 8 O, it's almost there, okay, so it's eight, other than that it's a bit of a big eight, so actually it's going to be more like 7 and A2 because it's not I have enough to get four. very close, so call it 7 and 1/2 of each so we can equalize them all.

I'm fine with my scale right now I just want to do a sort of shape step so I want the pizza with the individual balls of dough to be nice and round and I always say this like puff pastry dough or pie dough it's like whatever the shape of the dough is when it's resting, it's the shape that it's going to want to be when it's rolled out because you've got this kind of gluten-like orientation or directionality, so I want to lay them out in nice smooth rounds and then I'll lay them out with the seams. down on my OED baking sheet with oil, so having a little bit of oil on the surface is very helpful and the dough has definitely gotten less sticky now that it's had a chance to ferment in dough, so I just did it without even talking about it, kind of muscle memory, but I will explain how to get it to be kind of round and tight and nice.

This you definitely want to use your bench scraper, so let me take a slice. I'll show you because I have a lot of little pieces that I glued onto the portion, so this is what you're going to do. You're going to take your piece of dough and then I like that I don't actually turn it over, but I basically take one edge and pull the dough up and over itself and fold it over so I have that kind of stretched surface of the dough and then I'm using my angled dough scraper in contact with the counter and I'm pushing the dough towards itself and rounding it and that's going to help me shape it into a ball with this kind of smooth, tight dome.

Same thing, you move it towards you in this kind of circular motion and then after a couple of rotations you're really tucking the dough under itself and then it stays there and seals because the weight helps. That happens, so you've got this nice little package of dope, make some room on the baking sheet for me. One quick thing, you don't want to have too much oil on the surface, I mean, because again the dough is much less. stickier than the initial mixture, so you can have a little, but you need friction between the dough and the surface to be able to get the dough under itself, so you can always add more oil, but don't use too much, I only have a little bit here in case you need to pull, so I'll show you again, so I'm trying to take all of these loose bits on the surface and incorporate them into the ball and sort of inside.

I'm going to pull it up and up creating this softer part as if covering the portion and then I'm going to take my scraper, if necessary you can add a little bit of oil to it and work at an angle in contact with the surface as if you were pulling the dough towards itself and then in a circle and then it will move around the surface AL, so if you need to push it towards the center, you can see that it immediately forms this nice tall dome and that's it, here are my portions. I'm going to rub just a little bit of oil on the surface of each dome because I'm going to cover this and I don't want the plastic to stick, so just a little bit on each one to keep it from sticking, it's a lot easier. greasing the dough instead of greasing the plastic greasing the plastic is just messy and annoying, so I'm going to cover this loosely.

I don't need to tighten it I just want to make sure it seals in the air and now this is I'm going to go in the refrigerator and I can let it sit overnight so we can bake tomorrow morning. You have all this flexibility once it goes in the refrigerator, you can let them sit for about 2 hours and then bake them overnight if you make them. in the afternoon or they could be left overnight so we can bake them up to 24 hours later, which I think is what we're going to do because it's going to get too late here for us to get a full fire going which I'm going to take a couple of hours.

Where will this go? What a fun game. Don't try not to show this whole beef situation. It's not my favorite. This is my oven. I'm very proud of him, but also. super nervous because I've never really used it and I recently finished building it and every time you do something for the first time, like baking, it's a good example, it's like you're saying, well, I follow the instructions. It seems like everything is fine, but you never really know that there is such a big learning curve when cooking in any wood-fired oven. You have to understand how to judge heat, how to use the oven and the stages as it descends. temperature but today we are going to bake super hot and I hope it works guys, it's not that hot in there, that's our problem, that's the problem, what's the 10 you don't want to know? 180 no, we're at two, we're growing, we're at two, we started two hours ago, so we want, let's see what, what, what does it mean, over the limit, over the limit, maybe that would be good, would you aim right at the Fire?

Yes. Wasn't I supposed to do that Keo dancer about how to build an earth oven? Get the book. There is a bit of detail in certain parts. The good news is that I've been working on this for a year, but pizza only takes 2 minutes. cook, so hopefully we are nearing the end of this first project, how many

days

will the pizza last? Yeah, this is a 367 day pizza because Cal looked on his phone and saw that today is October 27th, it was October 24th that I dug the hole for the foundation, so it's been 368 days, rewind the footage, there's like 200 hours of how I built this oven, here we go, oh my gosh, it worked, oh, that's a root, it's a root, so today is dig day, I have to dig a huge hole for the oven so we can go below the frost line, fill it with gravel, reinforce it with concrete blocks and then we will have a super solid foundation for the oven and then there will be no worry about heaving when the ground freezes, so that's the purpose. to dig so deep and that's why we have to go around 4T and hence the mini excavator because as if I weren't digging a huge 4 foot deep hole with a shovel, the idea is to align the oven right in line with the stairs so we can come. right from the cover, go right to it and then center it on Center it along the garden, we should probably keep an eye on it, but I also feel like starting to dig, everyone.

Careful, ooh, that's a big chunk of something, okay, it was almost pure. stump yes, I love this, I'm having a great time, my goodness, so many worms, look, so many worms the chickens would love it, wow, there are so many worms everywhere, everywhere, I guess they like the dead tree and some larvae. This is a beetle larva. I think anyway let's get back to the topic. Oh God, I don't feel like I should be standing, let me get out of the hole, oh God, I'm 5'4 53. if I lay down, yeah, almost 5T, probably probably five and then maybe four this way.

I think if you go right up and pinch it, you could pick it up straight and I just pick it up like the stuffed animals in the something like that, oh my gosh, bye bye stump, oh that was so satisfying, oh my gosh, now it's all windy aft for the remainder of the project. We had rain overnight, so it's kind of full of water right now, but the hole is dug. so it's about 42 inches deep, the problem is there's like a couple inches of water in there, so we might have to wait until a dry day to do the foundation, here, come see the hole I dug.

It's magnificent. It's magnificent, it's really good, Felix, where are you going? I don't know, it's never been that way, come here, kitty, cat, kitty, oh come here, look, it's the outdoors, Felix, oh yeah, it's great, it makes great pictures, but it really smells like you. I, yes, it smells like hair. Hello Kitty, why Earth, Sky? Okay, so the concept is that the next bricks are made of mud, so we just skip the part where the mud is turned into bricks and then we make a brick kiln and just use the Earth. directly to essentially make a kiln shaped brick, that makes sense, everyone you know, most people are familiar with a brick kiln, that's what we're doing, we're just cutting out the brick making part and going straight to the oven part, oh god don't do it.

We have a machine that can make this Being to remove all the water, yes. I started loving this project. Now I love it less so once I am left with only an inch or so of water, to the point where I can no longer fill a bucket effectively. I'm going to start adding gravel, my goodness, it's really very muddy here. All this for an oven. It is for a furnace that will last a thousand years. I really wish they would come closer. with this pile of gravel, oh my gosh, it's so heavy there's a lot of rocks, it's a pretty good cover, so I basically filled the bottom with a couple of inches of gravel and it might actually be a good stopping point now.

It's also getting late so I think I'm going to let this sit overnight, come back in the morning and see if there's been any water seepage and if not then I think we're good to go. I'm going to make sand. and start leveling it and getting a base for the blocks.cement, so I guess that's the water line and we're just going to fill in with more gravel. I shouldn't have dug a hole that deep, but once you get the excavator going, it's hard to stop, so in theory the sand helps make up everything and fill in the rocks, but in reality it's a relatively small amount of sand. , but I will say it feels a lot more stable because yesterday with just that thinnest layer of gravel I could feel. the kind of muddy ground underneath moves and this feels very different, much more solid.

I'm going to finish filling the inside and outside with gravel and then we'll reinforce the rebar and pour the cement, it didn't make it to the concrete, but Cal and I both. agree it probably wasn't the best idea for me to mix my first concrete in the dark. I was joking when I called it an egg beater, but that's literally what it's called, it's so smooth, no lumps, it probably should have had the yes, yes, it probably should have been spun. Over there look at the wheels if I had to buy one more bag of mortar I'm going to do it but it's going to bother me a lot you know what it's called when you put the mortar on the side of the brick Do you know what it's called, spread it with butter?

What I've learned about mixing mortar is that you want it workable but not thick, so it's obviously too dry and it's definitely best to add it a little at a time so you don't overdo it and that's a good thing. The test of when you've reached the right consistency is if you take some with your Trel and hold it at a 40 45 degree angle, it shouldn't fall out of the first two batches like one that was slightly underhydrated, another that was slightly overhydrated, but I think. Now I have the knowledge and that is to spread it with butter and now I'm going to put in some insulation, so it's basically some wine bottles that I'm going to sandwich between layers of sand and then on top of the sand goes a layer. of refractory brick and that is the floor of the kiln, the purpose of the bottles is that they are there to trap air and air is a great insulator.

Some of these haris and I are not big drinkers, so some of these bottles are ours. saving them and some of them are asking in Chelsea Market where Harrison's restaurant is, if there is anyone, there is a wine bar. I think he went to the wine bar and asked them: Hi, can we take your recycling? Now I have something here. like a lot of a big mess, which is what it's been up to this point, honestly, it looks pretty professional, oh my god, thank you, oh my god, look, oh my god, this is so satisfying, this whole project, I'm very happy so far.

It's going to be 16 in the dome it's going to be 16 in the middle and you need that ratio of 10 over 16 it's like an important ratio in oven construction which is a ratio of the height of the door to the dome for that air circulation. I really have no idea how much water it will take. I think a lot to mix it and remove the sand. It's temporary, but that's what the vacuum inside the oven will become. It will definitely go out the chimney. Now that most of the work is done, we are still getting the oven up to temperature and I have my dough in the refrigerator.

I want to prepare everything else I need for the pizza, so I'm going to go with something like the classic margarita. In the kingdom, I'm not trying to do anything too fancy with this kind of first attempt, so I have some whole and peeled canned tomatoes. Here I'm going to make a quick no-cook sauce, keeping it in that Neapolitan realm. I have a food mill here, which is a very useful tool for pizza sauce because it leaves a little bit of texture that I like and then I have everything I need for the pizza, some fresh mozzarella that I have, we have a local store here where you can get this really good layered aella cheese that I'm going to put on top after I bake it.

I have some extra double zero flour to roll out the dough and this is semolina to sprinkle on the shell, it will help the dough slide in. oven for the rest the rest of the sauce besides the tomato I have a little salt a little red pepper flakes a little dried oregano olive oil and then basil to finish the cake the food mill is definitely a special piece of equipment this is something that is We don't use it that often in our house, but when we use it it's like the only tool for the job so basically it's a tool that looks like this and it's a way to press something through these thin holes.

And it helps separate similar seeds or skins and leaves a little bit of texture and it has these discs on the bottom with different sized holes so you can get different textures. It is very useful, you can use it as mashed potatoes. or make applesauce or that kind of thing, okay, so the first thing I want to do is drain my tomatoes. In my experience with making pizza, I need a can opener, so in my experience with making pizza I have definitely spent too much time assembling the pizza in the you peel and you have this very thinly stretched dough, then you put something wet on it and it will immediately make you want to stick to the shell and that's really bad because then you can't get it out of the oven and I have to do it in a fairly quick fluid motion and I'm not trying to make a calzone that folds back on itself in the oven, so even that point I want to make a sauce that's not too wet, so I'm going to drain the tomatoes, this is a 20 28 ounce can.

It's probably more than I'll need. I'm definitely making four pizzas at most. Some difficulties. God is having a hard time with this can opener. This is how it is used. can opener there, you get close enough so I'm going to drain them because whole peeled tomatoes come in some kind of liquid like tomato puree, so I'm not just draining them from the liquid that's in the can, but I'm going to open them I'm going to use my hands, let me wash them first like tomato shouldn't be a tomato sauce in a sense, it should be like little pieces of tomato that are spread over the surface of the dough so I'm going to use my hands and just open it up. the tomato and drain the liquid inside to puree the pulp.

There is quite a bit of liquid in the tomato. You can also remove the seeds. What I really need is a slightly less fine strainer, this is a very fine strainer. I'm going to save this liquid because I can add it like the next time I make a cooked tomato sauce, so now I have the tomatoes drained and opened. I'm going to put my food mill on my bowl. The tomatoes are going to work in a food mill, it's fun, so obviously they're already peeled, but if they weren't peeled this would be removing the skin, so now I have my tomato puree.

Sure you get everything out of the bottom of that puree disk, but still with a texture that I'm happy about, so here's the texture of that still very runny sauce. I just didn't want there to be any more liquid in there than there was. to be like this now this needs to be seasoned I'm going to season it to taste this is a little bit actually it's like sea salt I'm going to do a pinch of red pepper flakes maybe just a little bit of dried oregano but not even 1/4 teaspoon I think It's pretty strong, that's the thing, then maybe a tablespoon of olive oil, maybe it was more like two, so I'm going to give this a good stir, a little more salt, a little more oregano, it's good, it's bright.

It's tangy but not overpowering and I like the texture, it needs a little more salt, a little more olive oil, but I'm happy with the sauce. I think it's mainly a question of flavor, but also a lot of texture. Pretty light on the tomato, one thing I think people don't really think about when it comes to pizza is that it's a bread dish like pizza is about the crust, the toppings are there to enhance it and make the whole thing delicious, but like me No, I don't want to overload myself with the crust because I want it to be about the dough so that the sauce looks good, give it a final flavor, well seasoned, I'm going to put everything on my board, let's go. outside I'm going to grab my dough and we're going to keep feeding the fire and getting things ready to bake so nervous you want to preheat your oven no I don't want to breathe the oven I think it's like you're showing it so it's like I'm showing fear I preheat the oven inside the baking gods aren't going to respect that so I'm not going to do that I'm going to cut some mutts oh you know what maybe instead of cutting it, I should just break it, I'll break it, damn it, I had a cabin of logs that was getting like halfway through three, which is better than it was, but let me put in a shooting gate, so I'll show you what it looks like. like it's not really a door, okay you can make a real door, but I haven't made it yet, basically you want to cover the front of the oven because it will lose heat and you want to create like a flue where air can come in, but that's not it such a large opening where heat will be lost.

In fact, you can make a metal door, which Kiko recommends. The idea is to cover it and leave a couple of inches. You probably have 2. here at the bottom where the air is going to be sucked in and this is especially good if it's windy ah, there's a certain type of wood there, I think it's softwood, the moisture explodes like that, yeah, that looks good , that's quite a bit behind. I will tell you it feels hot in there, maybe not 600° or 500°, but it still feels hot, guys my shell arrived, thanks to Ben Oregon's red cedar creative, why did they have to special order it?

The timing couldn't have been better. I had to order a special shell on Etsy because the oven door opening is very narrow and from my experience I really wanted a wooden one. A metal shell is much harder to use than a wooden one and I found one on Etsy it was so beautiful and I was afraid it wouldn't arrive in time but it arrived literally now oh my god it's so beautiful look how beautiful it is it's perfect right it's perfect you think it's too small it's small it's small this is not big opening I think it's good look how it's tapered at the end so you can slide down it has a long handle this is perfect it's so beautiful I love it so much what were you thinking of making up to this point you know what I liked I had 14 ideas in my head, but none of them were good and I didn't think any of them were going to work well after several hours feeding the fire, putting the firing door in place, I might be ready, I have my dough , I have everything ready.

To go I have my shell, so the plan is that I'm going to check the fire. I can remove the firing door and if we're in a good spot with the embers, everything is kind of burnt and it's like it's glowing. The plan is to push it. towards the back of the oven along one side around the curve and maybe do a little sweep to have a clean floor for the pizza because in this style of oven, the firebrick floor that is the baking surface looks like be very somewhat clear about the style of the oven and then I had to make a pizza and I know I have to work fast because the longer the pizza dough stays in that shell with toppings, the harder it will be to use my little blobs of dough that have been hanging, hopefully not over proofing, so what I want to do is go like the top of the drop towards the flower to cover it a little bit and then flip it over onto my work surface. or I can start to get it kind of round and I definitely know that with pizza at especially high temperatures you don't want too much flour everywhere because it will burn and then you'll start to stretch, so once you get it to a certain thickness SL thinness I guess you can put it like your fingers really want to break it, so you can stretch it on the back of your hands like little fists.

This is not something I am very skilled at. I might I don't want to keep doing this, the middle 50% is too thin. You could probably do a lot to work on these edges and thin them out, but I don't think you want to do that, oh gosh, like it's thinning out a little bit there. So now I'm going to take off the shell to get the grits down and one thing I like to do is rub it into the shell. I think that tends to help a lot, so once it's here you can stretch it. a little bit more on the peel so basically I'm making a pizza exactly the same size as the peel so I'm going to pre-redden some pieces of mozzarella so I can make them really quickly and I'm just going to tomato sauce Mrs. because I don't want to delay more to put this in my oven and I can put everything else on top when very little tomato sauce comes out.

I would say not even 2 tablespoons I have statch aella to cover when it comes out ah I'm so nervous ready ready oh my gosh oh my gosh ah oh my gosh it came in it stayed on hold I think I should put the baking door all the way to the right which means and so we're we're baking this pizza at 350° and we're smoking it because there's quite a bit of smoke in there, so door B is designed to have a handle and it's designed to fit at an angle into the oven entrance on the inside of the chimney. so it's basically cutting the chimney like half oh but you know what that is only if you don't have charcoal because otherwise I'm literally smoking open it it had air actually yeah so maybe I should come back to this , yeah, that's just If you don't have wood, nothing burns, it doesn't matter, I just got excited to use it, it fits.

I cut it tohand, so we don't have a saw. This makes me so glad I put in a chimney because otherwise all that smoke comes out the front. I mean, seriously, it's okay. It looks like raw dough. The front is very cold. This is raw dough. No, I can't turn. Look at the texture when I try to touch it with it. peel, I mean, it's literally sticking to the I. I can't turn it around. The back is cooking, but I can't. The rest is too wet. I need it for just maybe another 10 minutes, 30 to 60 seconds. It's like the first pancake we make.

Sacrifice these tongs suck, there is no influence. I'm getting very frustrated. I just need a better pair of pliers than these. I'm sorry, where's the glove? My hand is getting hot. Where is the glove here? We're halfway to calzone on this one, the puff pastry no guys, King Arthur, we're so sorry, I made like a slow steamed flatbread, we need to heat it up more. This dough is going to overheat, it's already overheated a little bit, oh yeah, it's rising because it's in the direct sun there. Yeah, why don't I do it inside? I'll get it out here real quick.

What I do? Can I just take this one out? It didn't really work, okay, yeah, take it out, look at it, now there's mozzarella cheese in it. bottom of the oven I'm taking all this out, it's a total disaster the dough was too thin where is the glove on the left hand? Sorry, sorry, this is just a small taste of what Harris has to deal with sometimes when I get a little cranky. Look at it, it's pale, it's broken, it's got no bubbles and it's stopped all over the place and there's a fly on top of that, it's perfect, Harris, look, what happened?

I started yelling at everyone. I feel like it was what you experienced, you, me, me? I started complaining non-stop, you know, because of your rage, yeah, Harris, what's your criticism, it wasn't hot enough, it wasn't hot enough. I think people are one B. I'm trying it. I think people spend thousands of years trying to do it. learn how to make ovens and how to make pizza and there's going to be some trial and error that just throws up in the back, it tastes like wood, yeah, right? That's all I can say about it, the dough is not cooked.

Well, yes, no, are you at full capacity right now? What if I have to turn up the knob? What do you mean I'm full? It's really hot? Are you holding back? No, how hot is it holding? We are trying to warm it up as much as possible. how is it possible it's just not getting that hot it was like 350° there it was 800° so why do I know? Thanks, what was the purpose of this pizza? I don't know, we thought maybe the half-baked medum thermometer. Pizza we thought the thermometer was wrong maybe you know what a much more likely reason than anything else Vinnie told me to do it I love chili it tastes delicious I feel like there are a lot of things that went right today the cracking is minimal things really They are drying out It looks good, today we put the oven under a lot of stress with that amount of that level of heat for so long, however, it just didn't get hot enough for us to successfully make a Neapolitan style pizza, plus we had another type of variable against.

We, what is the over fermentation of the dough while we were waiting for the oven to heat up, so I'm not encouraged but not satisfied with this attempt, so we'll do it again, we'll make a little more dough tonight. We'll be back tomorrow with an oven that we'll let cool and dry even more. No rain is forecast. There is a bit of a breeze. We want to try again tomorrow. Try to make it very hot and make suitable pizzas. I can save I have more mozzarella I'm going to save the sauce like we're fine. We have everything we need.

We just need more heat and some fresh dough. We

took

some time. We will try again the next day. some fresh dough that looks great. I like having more space to work. C. Vinnie really

took

a lot of care and a lot of time to get this super hot, so now I feel a lot more confident and let's try it. the dough isn't too sturdy, the oven is up to temperature, so I want to push all those embers back, put a couple of fresh logs around that perimeter, get some flames going like up and around the dome, and those should be the really ideal conditions for pizza that I can stand. the temperature right in that area of ​​the floor where the pizza will go, but I can say that it is much hotter than yesterday and I think that is because it dried out like yesterday.

It had a nice long burn, but still retained moisture. a couple of coats for higher temperatures in the drier oven, oh it's like it's hot. I mean, I have enough coals to go around the entire perimeter of the oven, so toward the front it registered seven, kind of like the front is in the 600s and everything behind it is above the limit of the thermometer, which is 750, okay, so it's pretty hot in there, so I'm going to put a couple more logs in, although we already have some active flames dancing around. Oh, my hand got warm even in the glove.

Oh, like I really do, now I have to get some of this ash out of the ground, oh God, I like it like the skin on my face is tight because it just got super dry. hot, I'm going to go face down in the flour, oh God, you see, you really want to keep it in a ball shape because that will make it easier to roll it into a round, but oh well, on to my work. surface I'm going to use Vinnie's technique of dimpling and pushing the bubbles out and helping to establish a little bit of a border and this also helps prevent thin spots, now I can start stretching.

I do not do it. I want to make it much thinner than this a little bit of semolina in my shell working against the breeze here here not too much we're making square pizzas okay now race against the clock haris prepared in my tomato sauce it's a little thick how am I going to get it ? This, how am I supposed to make this spread? So I'm going to break up some mozzarella. I felt like we could have used a little salt yesterday, so I'll add a little salt on top and in the OV oven. Alright. It's already bubbling, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, it's already bubbling and it's already setting, I think I should move it now, yeah, where are those tongs going, like it's already pretty cooked on the bottom, I should do a 180, yeah, oh my gosh, and the cheese is setting. cooked on top too, oh my goodness it looks so good, I feel like it's almost almost ready, it looks like a pizza, it looks like the pizza dough is bubbling really well, oh my goodness I made a pizza, oh my goodness it looks so good. some red pepper flakes a little olive oil I still have a little bit of this Stella, so I'm going to put a little bit of this because it's really good a little bit of freshly cut basil, it seriously looks like a pizza, right, I still have some much more to do. do in this oven although I have a patch L cracks I have it do the plaster I have to do a whole roof so it goes away b OO good crunch through the crust okay that double zero flour will make it really crispy oh o look ooh looks pretty good looks fantastic smells really good like really good M bottom look how thin the crust is but the bottom is so crispy M the pool of cheese is still very hot a little too much salt but it's really good you guys should try this here Okay, let's close, we're done here, okay, okay, I will say that this oven project has been very humbling but also super empowering because I had to learn a lot on my own.

Somehow I absorb a lot of knowledge, luckily I had a whole year to do it. I came to this point from where I started and I'm not done yet. I have a couple more things to do, but it works, it's an oven, it gets really hot and I can make pizza and I can make bread, definitely let's go. To bring you more episodes of the outdoor oven now, can you guys go back and light the fire when I need to do it again? Okay, thank you for that learning process, but I feel like making bread and baking are learning processes and when things don't work out.

It doesn't work, you just have to try again, do something different. I want to thank King Arthur for sponsoring this episode. I feel like King Arthur is a comforting and familiar presence, like all flowers are so trustworthy. Make a pizza this good from start to finish. Bread is always in my kitchen. I love it so much. I feel supported by King Arthur and all of his products, so thank you very much for watching. Let's cook a couple more pizzas. Don't forget to like and subscribe. d