Windy City Pizza....

...with a twist -- the winds are the Santa Ana kind, and the city is LA.  That means the sauce will be on the bottom, too.

Figs are on the menu tonight with onions & Gorgonzola (or goat cheese), and some wild rocket on top.
 
I expect the usual pesto & mozzarella pizzas will make an appearance as well.

Some bread baking is also on the agenda: a ciabatta and two loaves of whole wheat sourdough -- all made with natural levain.

Never Again, Again.

Here is a link to the King Arthur organic high gluten flour mentioned in a comment to my last post -- I had no idea this product even existed until yesterday.  Perhaps I will have an opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison soon like I did with the Caputo Tipo 00 flour -- fun!

In the meantime, I need to get the protein content of my levain back up a few notches.  It looks like it's right around 13% right now, two feedings with 14% should pull it back to 13.75%.  Where would I be without spreadsheets!

Never Again

Last Sunday I fired up the pizza oven for the first time since July.  I've been out of flour for a bit and decided to to try making dough with the King Arthur's bread flour.   The dough itself seemed great, though a little stickier and with more rise than usual; I shaped it and put in the fridge to ferment, but as soon as we started working with it, problems.

First, the gluten strands hadn't really developed as much as I was used to.  The dough was very hard to work and had too much spring-back -- with a 9-oz. ball, I couldn't shape a pizza larger than 8" (usally I get a 10"-12" pizza out of that much dough), and two pizzas tore while shaping.  I had trouble getting the pizzas off the peels due to sticking, and once the pizza's went in the oven, they cooked very strangely -- burning on the outside, but not cooking fully inside.

So I'm going back to the Giusto's Ultimate Performer that I've had such success with in the past -- and to guarantee that I won't run out, I picked up a 50-lb. bag at Surfa's ($68)!  It's going to need to live in my office until I can find a container big enough to store all that flour ( I wonder how many gallons of flour 50 lbs. is?)

Pizza Picture

Second try with the Electrolux resulted in this nice looking and great tasting squash blossom & burrata pie. Scorched it just a wee bit. :)

A New Floor

One mistake I made building my original oven base was placing the slab too low.  It ended up being about 1/4" below the level of my patio slab, and thus a water collector on rainy days.  To make matters worse, weep holes in the block walls ended up letting water into the wood storage area from the surrounding soil.  This is now fixed. 

I placed and additional 3 cubic feet of concrete on top of the existing slab in the storage area.  Th e nw concrete raises the floor about a half inch, and id sloped to drain to the front.

One problem solved (I hope)

Got a Mixer!!

Electrolux Assistent; Ebay.  It was just delivered today.
I'll try it out this weekend with a little test mix.  Looks, and runs like new.

Squash blossom & burrata pizza and more...

There is a somewhat famous place here in LA that makes this pizza.  Squash blossoms were in the market, so I made a version.  I also made one with pesto sauce instead of red.  The other  pizza in the picture is a vegan version with spinach and squash blossoms, olive oil and sea salt.

Also on the menu were squash blossoms stuffed with ricotta, dipped in a light batter (seltzer, salt and flour) and fried in olive oil.  Easy to make and wonderful to eat.

Finally made somethiing besides pizza.

My daughter (12) made two berry galettes which we baked in the oven. A galette is a rustic tart or pie made with a very simple, sweet pie crust.  Ours will filled with blackberries and strawberries; and raspberries and apricots.

After all our pizzas were cooked for the night, I scooped out the hot coals into the ash can and brushed the interior clean, then waited for the temperature to drop from 600-ish to the 450-500 range, which took about a half an hour with the door open.

We popped the galettes in on cookie sheets and let them bake with the door closed for about 20 minutes or so until they were brown and crusty and oozing delicious-smelling berry juice.  Then we ate one for desert still warm from the oven.  To paraphrase WCW: it was delicious.

Really need to make a door

Without a door I can't bake real bread, and do other fun stuff. 

I spent a chunk of time today researching oven doors--particularly a door that could be made of fire resistant glass.  There are two transparent ceramic materials that can be used NeoCeram and PyroCeram.  They are rated to sustain constant temperatures 1290 and 1400+ degrees Fahrenheit, receptively.  They are also quite expensive; a door my size would cost about $200, or more, just for the glass alone plus cutting and drilling charges. Here's a link to a  glass door design posted on the Forno Bravo forum

The glass door would look great and let me monitor the fire from inside the kitchen and...it's just too expensive. So...

Option 2: oak.  I would need 10 linear feet of 4/4 oak by 6" wide to fabricate the main door panel, plus a foot or two more for a handle & brace.  If I do the oak door, I would back it with sheet metal and a layer of insulation.  That's about $40 of oak, plus a couple dollars for the sheet metal and the installation is "in-stock" in my shed.

Baking with Ralph's

Last couple of weeks Surfa's has been out of pizza flour, so I've been baking with the next best thing: Ralph's Bead Flour.  At $2.99 for 5 pounds, you can't beat the price.  True, it doesn't have the elasticity and extendability of the Giusto's flour that I prefer, but it's much better than any other brand-name bread flour I've ever tried.

In fact, I'm eating some leftover Ralph's-crust pizza right now; the crust is slightly chewy, but a bit heavier than the Giusto's-flour crust, but the color is wonderful and the flavor is pretty good, too! 

It seems that crusts made with the Ralph's flour benefit from extra-long, retarded ferments. My latest batch was (accidentally on purpose) refrigerated overnight due to a last minute baking-related schedule change.  It also seems to handle heavy toppings very well.

Give it a try if you can.

Materials List For My Oven

Includes materials to build the foundation slab, block base, and oven:

Oven Itself:
220 Fire bricks (I have about 30 left, but many are damaged)
3 50lb buckets of refractory mortar
2 bags of portland cement (I used 1.5)
1 bag of fireclay
50 sq ft (1 box) 1" ceramic insulation blanket (8lb)
2 pieces 2" thick ceramic insulation board
36" simpson class-a flue w/ base & cap
1 tube liquid nails
1 tube furnace cement
Misc screws, anchors, wire, etc.

Block Base:
39 8x8x16 block
4 8x8x8 block
3 bond beam block (for lintel)
5 bags mortar (3 for block mortar, 2 for stucco scratch & brown coats)
1 bag (4 cubic feet) vermiculite (for dome insulation)
50 bags of ready mix (6 bags were left over)
6 #4 bar
2 pieces 10 Ga 8x8 welded wire mesh (slab reinf)

Concrete Forms:
24' of 2x6
1 4x8 sheet of 3/4 plywood
4 12' 2x4 for shoring

Mistakes I Made

The oven is basically done, but if I were to do it again, here are some things I would change:

1. I should have shaped the cooking floor to fit the plan of the dome more accurately.  I laid it down without cutting many bricks thinking everything would be hidden by insulation.  Later, I went back and cut the overhanging bits off with masonry saw.  The hanging over bits made insulating the dome more difficult later.  The floor bricks need to be cut to fit the base template very accurately.
2. Insulation.  The rigid insulation has a butt-seam with the ceramic blanket just above where the cooking floor meets the base of the dome.  It would have been better to overlap this transition by at least 2 inches.  I get some heat loss at this seam.
3. I would add additional insulation to the floor.  3-4" of lightweight concrete or 2" more of ceramic board.  The underside of the slab gets up to 100° overnight.
4. I put aluminum foil in as a vapor barrier, but I think I put it in the wrong place.  I did brick, foil, insulation, vermiculite-concrete, stucco.  I think the foil would be better served between the insulation and vermiculite-concrete, where it would inhibit water penetration into the insulation, and be insulated from the hot brick
5. I would make the opening for the under-oven storage area as big as possible.  The wing-walls and the lintel do little structurally, and limit the under-oven storage capacity unnecessarily.  The lintel reinforcement could have been incorporated in the slab, and I would at a minimum, reduce the wall width to 12" on each side (it's 16" now) -- or eliminate them and make the base a U shape.  That would give me more room to store wood.  I also think that making the base H-shaped in plan could be interesting.  The openings of the base could point to the sides, or front and back, providing lots of wood storage space.
   
6. Finally, the floor of my storage area is too low and fills with a water that seeps in when it rains.  I plan to fix this issue by adding about 3/4" of concrete, sloped at 1/4" per foot toward the front to provide drainage.  I have since fixed this :)

Snow on the Mountains

Today was the first day without rain since last Saturday.  We've had about 6.5" of rain (that's a lot for LA).  Next weekend the forecast is for more rain, so it looks like I will need to hold off my next bake for another week.

The upside is the bay window in the living room framed a vista dominated by beautiful snowy mountains this morning.  

Rushed Dough

Despite forgetting to feed the levain the night before, pizza turned out pretty good last night. Because the levain wasn't ready in the morning, I had to compress the entire dough making timeline. 

Going short on Levain

Finally found a day to invite my neighbors over for pizza: Today.

However, I was out all last night and got home late and.... forgot to feed the starter and take it out of the fridge!!

Dome Done.

Tuesday morning I finished the second (and possibly last) stucco coat on the dome. So except for the stucco color coat, the dome is done, and I no longer need to leave a blue tarp over it every day.

Getting the stucco to make a dome shape was fairly easy -- surprisingly!