The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a wet blanket on pretty much any pizza parties, which has given me time to work out my recipes and strategies for successful pizza nights.

You may have noticed in past posts that I am not a big fan of surprises when I'm hosting a pizza night. I prefer those evenings go off without a hitch, pushing out gourmet pizzas every few minutes, rewarded by nodding heads and big smiles. When the dough doesn't rise, oven is slow to heat, or any other minor catastrophe, I really feel like I have let my guests down. So, this year has given me time to work out the foolproof strategies for a no-surprise evening.

In my last post, I had described a dough recipe that utilized instant dry yeast with a prolonged cold fermentation. I hoped to eliminate the uncertainty that sometimes comes with using sourdough starter while achieving the same flavor, texture, and digestibility. Over the last few months I have experimented a lot more with this recipe, finding the sweet spot on fermentation time and consistent results.

I've continued to experiment more with the high gluten bread flour. Because the consistency is near identical to the 00 flour, working the dough is very similar. The higher gluten gives me a little longer cold ferment time - usually an extra day or two. Any extra cold fermentation goes a long way in improving taste and texture. I've also experimented with a half and half recipe using 500kg Antimo Caputo Blu and 500g ADM High Gluten, which achieves a nice balance. Whereas an all high gluten recipe will result in a big crumb and puffy cornicione, the 50/50 recipe provides a nice balance between the two. In all this experimentation, I have been using the instant dry yeast, which continues to make for a predictable fermentation and rise.

Now, I feel I need to acknowledge the naysayers and purists who say the recipe or approach is not authentic Napoletana or is blasphemous for using any yeast other than sourdough poolish or biga. Having gone down that road (and spent many years doing so). I can confidently say this approach is as good as the alternatives and conforms to the AVPN regulations while making life easier...or at least less stressful. It's not like going out and buying dough or making it in one day - it still takes time and planning. It's just easier to achieve success when it counts: on pizza night with hungry guests.

My recipes and process weren't the only thing I've been refining. As I was making dough batches every week and COVID prevented any gatherings, I ended up using my older Blackstone gas oven just for convenience. It gets almost as hot as my wood oven and is far easier to get up to and stay at temp. 

It was just so nice to fire up the oven and just forget about that part of the process. It does the job adequately enough to know whether I was getting the dough right. As I do love working a fire, not having to worry about the oven was nice for a change. Which got me thinking about my fuel sources.

My wood burning oven is the Pizza Party, which was imported from Italy back in 2016. I really liked the oven and was considering buying one of their gas ovens. While using gas could have been pizzaiolo blasphemy years ago, the industry has been warming up (Ha! I crack myself up) to the idea.  Sadly the company stopped selling to the US and I have been looking at alternatives ever since. 

I'm something of a mods guy, so there were a few people that had built custom gas burners for the Pizza Party oven and of course I followed suit. After some trial and error, I engineered a pipe burner that I can use when I don't want to use wood. While it still needs about the same amount of time to get to full temp, it's much easier to regulate the temperature. There are still areas for improvement, but it would require more involved modifications that I wasn't willing to commit to. While this fixed one issue with my current oven, I still was looking for a more portable solution.

There have been a lot of new ovens that have come out in the last  couple years, which made it difficult to decide what the next one would be. My wood burning oven, while being more portable than a masonry oven, is still a challenge to move around - especially by myself. Something like eight or nine years ago I had a tiny gas pizza oven that could reach temps in the 700° range on a good day. Not Neapolitan by any means but it still could make an okay pizza. I loved being able to throw it into the car along with a few dough boxes and ingredients and make pizza for my friends or family.

Since then, I've kept thinking that I want that option and after enough encouragement by friends and family, decided to pull the trigger on a gas pizza oven from Italy capable of temps of 1000°. Unfortunately, it was shipped with a subsidiary of FedEx and so it took two days to ship from Sicily to Memphis where it has sat ever since. It has now been in Memphis for almost a month and I still don't know when FedEx will deliver it. That is another post in and of itself.

There have been a lot of great little ovens that have come on the market over the last year. So much so, that I want to put together a post with all the ovens available. Hopefully by then, I will have received my oven and can provide a review on that as well. I am also planning a post on my refined pizza dough recipes as they have changed slightly. While my original recipe is still viable, I've refined a bit in ingredients and process to arrive at my new standard recipes. 

So, a few posts I still need to get to and I'm also coding a new podcast section on this blog application as I'm toying with the idea of launching a podcast. Oh yeah, and I will be spending several days a week calling FedEx to find out where my damn pizza oven is.