Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

A fundamental truth about me that you may have picked up on is that I love pizza.

In fact I’m obsessed with pizza.

There is something elemental about the satisfaction of sinking your teeth through a thin veneer of crispy charred crust encompassing a springy and open crumb redolent with sourdough aroma, topped with a bright , acidic, and sweet tomato sauce, and mixed with a scant amount of high butterfat Buffola mozzarella and a drizzle of green olive oil. It just kills me, and it always will.

Early on in this blog I promised to share my pizza making method. But I haven’t yet. And you may be wondering why.

And the answer is simple. My oven broke. Or more specifically my oven got fixed.

You see, anyone who knows anything about pizza will tell you that there are four essential ingredients to a great pie. They are, in descending order of importance:

1. High heat.

2. Slow fermentation, (preferably with a wild sourdough starter.)

3. A high hydration dough with good gluten structure.

And

4. Good ingredients.

And by far the most important factor is number one, high heat. Which is a constant struggle for a person with a conventional oven.

550° is not “High heat.” It is not even close. In pizza terms 550° is like a lukewarm hot tub that starts making you feel clammy and cool the minute you get into it.

Which brings me to oven hacking.

The classic oven hack is to clip off your doorlock and cook your pizza on cleaning cycle (about 900°.)

And I tried that simple hack. But my oven is a fancy Viking Professional number. And it is smarter than me. And it automatically shuts off the heating element on cleaning cycle whenever I open the door.

So then I experimented with an “oven within an oven” concept making a separate chamber within my oven out of firebricks. This allowed me to creep just past 600 for my stone temperature. Not nearly enough.

The next step was creating “ice sleeves.” These were nifty little condom like devices fashioned from wet paper towel and insulating tape and tinfoil that I would slide over my thermostat whenever the oven turned off at high temperatures.

Ice Sleeves = Better Pizzamaking

Which unintentionally led to my final strategy. The broken thermostat.

Which was a giant leap forward. Once the thermostat broke I could turn my oven on to virtually any temperature, and it would not turn off until it reached a stone temperature of at least 750°.

Sure, the oven became unusable for baking cookies or turkeys or anything else. But that’s not the point.

The important thing was that I needed only to turn my oven on and I would have a blazing inferno ready for 1 to 3 minute pizza pies a mere 45 minutes later.

And so for the last four years that’s what I did. I made good pizzas. And It was great. No complaints.

Our social life was largely inviting friends over for pizza. And it was fun and delicious.

But then a couple of months ago I turned on my oven and it only went to 200.

It was broken. And not in the good way.

And so we called the oven repair man.

And for $500 he pulled out a bunch of little melted bits from the inside of my oven circuitry and replaced a number of parts including the thermostat.

Little melted bits pulled from my oven

And now it turns off at 550° again.
And after discussing the options with my wife, it has been decided that there’ll be no more oven hacking.

So the only real option now is to build an outdoor woodfired pizza oven. And this will happen, for it must.

But until then you’re on your own.

If you’re truly interested in embarking on your own pizza quest in the meantime, a good place to start is over at pizzamaking.com on their forum. There are a lot of smart pizza obsessives over there.

But beware. The search for great pizza is not unlike Capt. Ahab’s search for Moby Dick. It is fraught with risk.

(A.k.a. if your house burns down, don’t blame me, I’m only a doctor.)