Pizza ovens

[Midpack]

IIRC correctly from my pizza making days decades ago, the secret to getting the raw pizza off the peel into the oven intact (still round) is

• lots of corn meal, as others have pointed out above, but also
• you have to be committed pulling the peel out from under. It won’t work if you try to slowly ease it off, the right approach is more like ‘the pulling a tablecloth from a table magic trick.’ QUICK!

 

[bigreader]

We bought an Ooni Karu 12 last Christmas as I wanted some of that great pizza I had during my 2 years of military service in Italy many years ago.

As others have said there is a learning curve and we are still learning. I use wood and lump charcoal heat source and have figured out the fire\heat side of things. My wife is the dough\pizza maker and she still can't get the Neapolitan style in her head, she wants to load the pizzas down, American style, no matter how much I tell her you can't do that. Our biggest challenge has been getting the pizza off of the peel into the oven. When you load them down they stick to the peel. We actually just fired the oven up yesterday with the wife trying new ideas on getting the pizza off the peel which was mostly a failure.

So experience after a year is mixed but we have only probably cooked with it 8-10 times and still need more experience....but I do love that taste when we get it right. I burn wood in the house so have plenty of access\experience\tools needed for wood, city folks would probably have to find a wood source. Getting oven out, setting up, starting the fire and getting oven to temp is probably a 30 minute experience. A lot of the dough recipes need to be made a day ahead of time. A low chest level spot for the oven is much nicer for tending fire and you need a high ceiling if you want to be under roof. I am glad I did not go for the bigger oven, 12" is plenty big and the bigger pizza I think would be much harder to make and cook.

I use a lot of coarse cornmeal on the peel that came with my Ooni to create a seamless trail of cornmeal ball bearings. Midpack is right. If you go fast and there is enough cornmeal, the pizza slides right off. I am a city dweller and you're right, the wood is a problem, since the pieces need to be pretty small to fit in the firebox and. After trying charcoal and pellets, I am now using wood chunks as fuel.
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[Music Lover]

OP here with an update. We were at Costco this morning and they had a 12" Ooni pizza oven (gas fired) on for $349.99 (CDN). It came with a pizza peel so we bought one.

When we looked at a local store a few months ago they were about $450, now they're a little more just like everything else that's gone up in price. So $350 with the addition of a pizza peel is a good deal.

 

[RockyMtn]

We bought an Ooni Karu 12 last Christmas as I wanted some of that great pizza I had during my 2 years of military service in Italy many years ago.

As others have said there is a learning curve and we are still learning. I use wood and lump charcoal heat source and have figured out the fire\heat side of things. My wife is the dough\pizza maker and she still can't get the Neapolitan style in her head, she wants to load the pizzas down, American style, no matter how much I tell her you can't do that. Our biggest challenge has been getting the pizza off of the peel into the oven. When you load them down they stick to the peel. We actually just fired the oven up yesterday with the wife trying new ideas on getting the pizza off the peel which was mostly a failure.

So experience after a year is mixed but we have only probably cooked with it 8-10 times and still need more experience....but I do love that taste when we get it right. I burn wood in the house so have plenty of access\experience\tools needed for wood, city folks would probably have to find a wood source. Getting oven out, setting up, starting the fire and getting oven to temp is probably a 30 minute experience. A lot of the dough recipes need to be made a day ahead of time. A low chest level spot for the oven is much nicer for tending fire and you need a high ceiling if you want to be under roof. I am glad I did not go for the bigger oven, 12" is plenty big and the bigger pizza I think would be much harder to make and cook.

Had the same problem and destroyed many pizza's trying to get it off the peel. Bought one of these and you just dress the pizza on the quick disk and throw it in the pizza oven. Haven't mangled a pizza since!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MCDNWGQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[Starsky]

Regarding sticking, I had the same problem with moving the pizza around and found that the recommended semolina flour would burn and taste bitter, so I looked for other alternatives.

My current preference is to lay the dough and build the pie on parchment paper (that I cut to the size of the dough before cooking). The paper burns/browns but doesn't catch fire under the pizza, and comes off easily when I take the pizza out of the oven. It makes the uncooked pizzas very easy to maneuver without sticking to anything and makes cleanup a breeze.

One other thing I learned when throwing a crust is that the more round the ball of dough you start with, the more round the pizza will be that you throw.

One final sinful cheat code that I discovered to form very thin dough, is to use a dinner plate. After you start to flatten the dough into a pie shape you can wrap the dough over the edges of a plate like saran wrap, and slowly work the dough across the plate to pull a very thin crust that is the perfect, round shape without tearing. I let it rest face down on parchment for a few minutes to allow the dough to relax before cutting off the excess dough and transferring it from the plate to the paper for cooking.

 

[Music Lover]

I made pizza in the pizza oven for the first time last night, they turned out pretty good, definitely better than in the oven. It's a bit of a learning curve and I could have done better but we're both happy with the first results.

I let it warm up long enough to ensure the stone was hot but then I should have turned it down a bit. With the flame on high the top of the pizza burned a little and the crust was just a tiny bit undercooked. Next time I'll turn the burner down before putting the pizza in and it should be fine.

I'm weak at hand shaping the dough so I used a rolling pin to ensure a consistent thickness, then covered them and put them in a warm oven for a while to rise. Had I not done that the dough probably would have been too dense.

They really do cook fast, I didn't time it but each pizza took less than 2 minutes. Once you put it in you can't walk away for more than a few seconds, you have to continually monitor it. But since it takes less than 2 minutes from start to finish that's no big deal. It's also a good idea to remove it part way through and rotate it as the back of the oven is hotter. I originally had concerns about the dough sticking to to peel or the stone but there was no issue, they slid off the peel easily and came out of the oven just as easy.

 

[ScoopKona]

1) Coarse semolina flour is better than cornmeal for keeping pizza from sticking to the peel.

2) The whole thing about ovens is thermal mass. The more the better. (But also, the more the longer it takes to warm the oven up to temperature. I have an infinite supply of wood, so I'm OK with more mass.)

One of the things I like about Italy is that they have a "stone oven in the back yard" culture almost as much as Americans have a "grill/smoker in the back yard" culture. And they make all sorts of dishes in their stone ovens -- not just pizzas.

And it has to be stone. A metal oven heated to the same temperature would burn, not bake. One of the things that is going into the shipping container for my final move is enough refractory bricks and refractory cement to make small(ish) stone oven. Probably around one meter in diameter. That's a good size and won't require too much wood to get up to temperature.

There's no limit when it comes to "going down the pizza rabbit hole." Are you going for the 330C Roman style of pizza? Or the 370C Neapolitan style? Or even hotter? A group of Roman physicists posted a paper on this earlier this year. It's all about thermal conductivity and the ratio of "how fast the crust cooks sitting directly on the stone, compared to the top, which cooks at the much lower boiling-point temperature because of liquids in the toppings. With the right materials and the right temperature, these times are equal -- about two minutes.

Lacking an oven that gets to these temperatures, add more oil to the dough and make a New York style pizza. And I'm "team ferment your pizza dough." But there are other viewpoints -- and as long as the pizza is good, that's fine.

 

[RobbieB]

The steel in the oven at 500 worked good. Next shot, steel in BGE spaced up to deck height with bricks and 700 dome -

 

[old medic]

Does anyone use a cast iron "stone" like this :

YES... have 2 of them from Lodge... And we normally cook pizzas in our Green Mountain Grill smoker at 550.

But the story behind the pans...We were camping with a group of friends, and had run to Walmart to pick up a few things.... Wife always hits the clearance isle... found them for $15 each... LOL bought all 7 of them, and sold them back at the camp... Then won the 2nd back at the raffle