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