If you are in the business of making pizzas then you know that choosing the right kind of pizza oven is just as important as the ingredients you use in making your pizzas taste great. I want to share with you some insights that i have gathered on my quest to find the best pizza oven in the world!!
Right, let's start with what it takes to make a great tasting pizza. Use the freshest ingredients available, preferably all organic and never, i repeat never use a frozen pizza base- that's like graffiting over the Mona Lisa! I am sure we all agree that the pizza base (and i do prefer thin crust) needs to be perfectly crisp. The tomato sauce should be bursting with flavor but not too heavily reeking with garlic unless you are trying to ward off the undead. The cheese should be the best quality buffalo mozzarella that simply melts in your mouth. Check out this pizza dough recipe below (makes about 4 thin crust pizzas):
1-2 Packages yeast ( 1/4 or 1/2 oz. or 2-4 teaspoons of yeast)
2 teaspoons honey
4 cups of organic flour
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 cup olive oil
1 and 1/2 cups of warm filtered water
Now that you have mastered the art of pizza making, let's jump to pizza baking! Choosing the right type of pizza oven to bake your masterpiece is extremely important. A mediocre oven will severely cramp your pizza's style! This is where we step into our time machine and head back 2000 years. The average ancient Joe had a wood burning clay oven at his disposal. In it they would bake some bread, roast a leg or two of lamb, and wash it all down with some potent home made wine! The meat would taste divine because the clay would seal in all the lovely juices and flavors. The bread would bake very quickly thanks to the 3 types of heat transfers that take place inside a clay oven (conductive, convective and radiant). Clay also has natural insulating properties so heat is well retained inside the oven. It also distributes the heat very evenly so you don't get any cold spots.
When you are trying to find a pizza oven that captures all these great benefits look no further than the Clay Oven Company's Clayburn pizza oven range.
I love the Clayburn Fornette. It's a gas-fired clay pizza oven that's got quite a wide mouth so you can easily dish out the perfectly crisp pizzas.They also have a wood burning and gas fired oven called the Clayburn Amberglow. What's cool is that you can get them to customize your very own pizza oven with mosaic tiles and the name of your restaurant written on the front...pretty neat stuff. Check out this cool video showing these clay pizza ovens in action!
