Pizza!

I spent Friday morning picking up last minute supplies: Surfas for a new metal peel, and a wire brush/scraper combo thingy; cheese, toppings, and firewood from the grocery store; Baller's for a dowel and hardware to extend the handle on my old wooden peel.

At around 1 PM, I mixed dough, then went back out to work on the peels and brush. The metal peel was too wide -- so I cut an inch off either side and reshaped it with tin snips. The dowel was notched to fit the wooden peel and attached with carriage bolts and wing nuts.

At around 2, I folded, divided and shaped the dough into 10, 7 oz. balls and stowed them in individual containers in the fridge to slow their fermentation.

At 5:30, it was time to get things going -- the fire was lit in the oven, and the dough came out to warm up to room temperature. My co-hosts arrived and started to be prepare toppings.



At around 7:30, my six-year-old assembled the inaugural pizza on the wooden peel --pesto with mozzarella cheese-- and I slid it onto the hearth. About 90 seconds later I was slicing up the first pizza of the night -- crispy, tender, slightly chewy-- pretty close to perfect.

For the remainder of the night kids and adults made pizzas, cooked pizzas, and ate pizzas; the last pizza left the oven around 10:30 PM. A pretty perfect beginning.