The last word in domestic pizza

Blog material is beginning to dry up, soon the relentless travel posts will have to start again, unless something else decides to invade my garden. Locusts perhaps? Or I could hit the patch - surely it must be about to wake from its summer slumber? But before I revert here is one final nod to garden living. Pizza. But let's back up a bit first. I love growing plants and I enjoy gardening, in particular I like attempting to turn a suburban London back garden into a sub-tropical paradise. Everywhere you look there are palms, bamboos, cycads, agaves, aloes, yuccas, araucarias and so on. None of them should be here, and it's definitely not for everyone, but I love it. It's like being on holiday. It has been a labour of love in the tiny amount of spare time I seem to have and it looks pretty nice if I don't say so myself, definitely not the normal domestic garden vibe, and a very very long way from a sterile rectangle. But whilst it looks pretty cool we've rarely spent much time enjoying it. Mainly this is due to the weather being constantly rubbish, but it's also because I'm too busy doing stuff to it to sit in it, that it's too polluted (see recent posts), and finally because we've never really had any reliable garden furniture on which to sit. That changed this summer with the purchase of a new table and chairs, some cushions, a parasol, and then a disgustingly ugly but extremely practical outdoor storage box to put it all in. We initially put this on the terrace but it was so horrible that we couldn't bear to look at it and it was relegated to further down the garden. Seeing as it doubles as a bench it seemed only right to put in in the spot that was until recently the cat toilet, and which had after all originally been conceived as a nice place to sit. We have come full circle somehow. It is still ugly but I have managed to vaguely conceal it amongst tropical plants and break up the outline a bit, at least from the top of the garden looking down. Thus:

Because the tables and chairs are new and shiny, and because the weather has finally been decent, we've been eating outdoors quite a bit at the weekends and also after work. Again, see earlier post about loss of paté. And it so happens that this storage box is sufficiently large to also fit our wood-fired outdoor pizza oven that my sister bought us a few years back. And because it's right there and no longer buried in a chest indoors I fired it up this weekend. 

I'd forgotten how fantastic it is! It's called an "Ooni" (other brands are available). It's not big - one small pizza at a time - but because of that it packs away nice and compactly. It has three retractable legs, a removeable chimney stack, a hopper for fuel - in this case wood pellets, and a 12 inch stone slab. It only takes around a quarter of an hour to reach the required temperature of around 400 degrees, and part of the magic is that as well as the stone slab on the bottom becoming incredibly hot, the design of the oven means that the flames from the wood pellets arc over the top above the pizza. It is impossible to describe how different - better different - a pizza tastes when cooked in this manner. Like eating pizza at a proper pizza restaurant, but somehow even better than that as you have made it yourself. It comes out piping hot with just the right amount of charcoal on the crust, a firm base, and with lightly grilled toppings, And it is unbelievably rapid, probably no more than a minute if it is maintained at the right temperature. You have to keep an incredibly close eye on it, and turn the pizza 90 degrees probably once every 15 seconds. It is so quick that a family of five can't eat pizza quicker than you can cook it, and this includes teenagers.

Here's a photo of it on top of our fixed barbeque. I must investigate getting a lid for it that will protect it during the winter and during rain, but then also double as a pizza oven table in the summer. And finally a photo of it in action. Such was my greed and the familial clamour for more that I forgot to take a picture of a pizza on a plate, but you get the idea.