Pizza - recipes, equipment, tips & techniques

Love this post.

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Lovely pizza! Here’s a video that helped me make a more even crust, How to Stretch Your Pizza Dough & How To Use a Pizza Peel - YouTube. Shape doesn’t matter, but having a uniform thickness is a good thing.

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Between the roccbox, ooni or other wood fired oven what do people recommend.

I want to use it to cook not only pizzas but other items like @hppzz

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Ooni has several models varying mainly on size and fuel. The newer ones are all well reviewed, i would look at the 16 inch size. Gozney has the roccbox and now the dome. The dome sounds amazing but unproven and right now delivery’s aren’t happening til summer and fall. Though the company itself has developed good rep with the roccbox.

Those two Companies are market leaders for the mid to lower end home pizza ovens. There maybe few others out there if you due diligence but can’t go wrong with either.

Personally I love the convenience of gas. Most people I know with wood fired pizza ovens don’t notice much of a difference since it’s only cooked for 2 minutes.

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Doing a little cursory research it looks like some models have both gas and wood options for both ooni and roccbox. Anyone have one of those?

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I have the Roccbox with the new wood burner. I love the oven, but the wood burner sucks. I even bought the wood fuel which is kiln dried oak cut to fit into the wood burner. 90 minutes preheating doesn’t even get to 600 degrees.
Fueling it with propane in no problem. Its a great oven but the wood burning aspect is useless.

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Off-topic question: do you oven broil the fish in a dry pan?

the collar and saba have plenty of natural oil so i don’t add any extra and have no issues sticking. plus the cast iron is screaming hot so it sears pretty instantly. that’s the nice thing bout this method of cooking it in a pizza oven–flames on top creates the char and bubbles, but the heat from the pan from below gives a great sear.

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Cooked two parcooked pies last night. Put them in at 700 instead of 600 and they came out with perfectly crisp crusts. Only took a picture of the first one. I brushed it with garlic oil which is visible on the peel.

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Thanks for the tips. What temperature do you cook at when you put the cheese and toppings on?

My crust looks awful in that picture because I’ve been using metal tongs to move the pizza around. Do you use the wooden Ooni pizza peel to move the pizza around in the oven? I usually rotate the pie 90 degrees 3 times to get 1/4 of the crust closest to the fire.

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I have a Roccbox so I use their peel to pull the crust out and turn it either by hand or with tongs. I may eventually buy Gozney’s turning peel. I turn by sight; if the edge closest to the flame is getting too dark I turn. Depending on temp that’s generally every 30 to 40 seconds.
I have been parcooking at 600, then topping and cooking at 700.

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In the Roccbox the thermocouple is mounted under the stone.

Made a Detroit pie in the Roccbox the other night. I have vacillated between cooking Detroit pies in the Roccbox or on a steel in the oven. Gozney calls for cooking the pizza for around ten minutes at 572F, Detroit Style Pizza Recipe | Gozney. I found this to cook the top too quickly even on a low flame. Doing it on a steel in the oven doesn’t give as good a texture as the higher temp Roccbox. This time I kicked the Roccbox up to 680F, shut off the gas, and let the bottom cook for five minutes. Then I lit the oven and cooked the pie for three minutes under a high flame; reversed the pan and cooked another three minutes. Came out almost perfectly. Next time I will leave it for another minute or two before I turn the gas on.
I used Peter Reinhart’s technique of putting half the cheese on while the dough rises. Really gives a nice crisp texture to the bottom of the crust. Cheese used was Murray’s Butter Kase, a high butterfat cheese with a slight funky flavor. Its the closest substitute for Brick Cheese I have found in LA.



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With the special pan, 15 minutes in the oven at 525° fan works perfectly for me. You need time for the cheese to melt off the butterfat and the crust to fry in it. I think butter kase is 50% butterfat and brick cheese is higher.

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That looks perfect!

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@ebethsdad - thanks in advance for buying this book and giving us the cliff notes.

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Unfortunately Amazon shipping gets delayed and delayed - looking forward to use it soon. Hopefully it is as good as the original one and the bread one.
eGullet has already a first discussion where people start cooking from the book

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eGullet is still active?

Senior center dance party active but yes. Mostly pastry and baking, then cookbooks & kitchen consumer.

I think there is a lot of valuable information on egullet so i try to post every once in a while so it doesn’t disappear completely

Like all discussion forums (including this one) they have a loyal core - it’s still a good forum if you look for more cooking/baking related topics (for some of bread baking/chocolate/ice cream making discussions some experts are also participating)

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