Anna’s Wood Fired Oven Blog

At home, my husband Peter is the pizza maker, or as they say in Italy, the pizzaiolo. He loves firing up the oven and calling over a few friends. This spells holiday for me as we enjoy amazing pizza in the backyard.

Peter is often experimenting with different dough recipes, yet our favorite dough is still the Neapolitan, (click here for recipe). Growing up in Naples made me appreciate the consistency and the wider rim of this pizza.

A word about flour and mozzarella cheese:

• Pizza dough made from good quality organic white flour has the best taste. You may also like the Hudson Cream flour, check it out.
• Bel Gioioso fresh mozzarella cheese is what I buy because it has the right firmness needed for cooking in the wood fired oven. You can usually find it at Costco for a great price. Cut it in small cubes, rather than shredding it, this will prevent it burning in the hot oven. The mozzarella balls in water are too “wet” I find for use as a pizza topping.

Truffle and Arugula Pizza — Peter’s Favorite

Neapolitan pizza dough

Topping, enough for garnishing one pizza pie:

4 ounces fresh mozzarella cheese, cut in cubes

4 slices of Italian fontina cheese

1-2 tablespoons parmesan cheese, shredded

1 handful of fresh arugula leaves

Truffle oil

Optional: 3 slices of prosciutto

Garnish with the mozzarella and fontina cheeses and place in the 650 to 750 degrees oven. Give the pizza a quick turn with the pizza turner after about 1.5 minutes and then slide out of the oven when ready, about another minute and a half.

When the pizza comes out of the oven piping hot, sprinkle the parmesan cheese, add the truffle oil, and sprinkle a handful of fresh arugula on top. Optional: add prosciutto slices.

Red Onion and Bell Pepper Pizza — Anna’s Favorite

Generally speaking, pizzas are topped with crushed tomato sauce straight from the can, but in this instance, I like the sweeter taste of cooked tomato sauce coupled with red peppers and onions.

Neapolitan pizza dough

Topping, enough for garnishing two pizza pies:

1 can peeled San Marzano tomatoes

1 small red onion, sliced

1 small red bell pepper, sliced

1 teaspoon balsamic red vinegar

5 tablespoons olive oil

1 garlic clove

8 ounces fresh mozzarella cheese, cut in cubes

5-6 fresh basil leaves

Brown onion and bell pepper with about 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large saucepan on medium heat. When the onion and pepper have softened, add the balsamic vinegar. Continue to cook, uncovered on low heat, for about another 10-15 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Make your favorite tomato sauce. Here’s what I do for a simple tomato sauce. Fish out the peeled tomatoes from the can and reserve the juice for other use. Slice the tomatoes. In a saucepan add about 3 tablespoons of olive oil and one clove of garlic. Add the sliced tomatoes, on low flame, let the sauce come together nice and thick, for about 15-20 minutes. Salt to taste.

Spoon tomato sauce on pizza with circular motion. Add the mozzarella cheese evenly. Add the cooked onions and bell peppers, but avoid the juice as this will wet the dough too much. Slide the pie in the oven and bake. Add the basil leaves to the piping hot pizza just out of the oven.

Buon appetito!

The Italian in me has the same attitude come good or bad times: let’s sit down to a well-prepared meal! It’s no wonder then that one of my resolutions is to cook up a storm of new recipes in my wood-fired oven. I will be saying “Buon appetito!” a lot.

Here’s a preview of what is coming up in the months ahead.

Bread by Charles Van Over, fresh from the oven

I am very excited about the pizza and bread recipes described by Charles Van Over in his classic book The Best Bread Ever. He breaks all the rules of bread baking and the result is incredible! He doesn’t proof the yeast, uses cold water instead of warm, and…get this… doesn’t knead the dough but uses the food processor. Genius.

I met Charles and his wife Priscilla last fall in Connecticut. They are both very accomplished chefs and are installing one of our Italian wood-burning ovens. I can’t wait to turn the spot light of my website to showcase their creative talent for your benefit.

When baking bread and pizza I have found that the taste is greatly enhanced by a wood fired oven. If you are considering installling a modular oven, the best ones are made of refractory clay.

What’s refractory clay you wonder? It’s high quality clay heated to very high temperatures and cooled after it forms into small balls with a hard crust and a porous center. It is in the tiny air bubbles within the center that the heat is trapped and slowly released. The exceptional thermal properties of clay can simply not be replicated within other materials, such as cement alumina.

Refractory Clay

This becomes apparent when you bake bread, because you will need to scoop out all the embers from the oven and use only the indirect heat accumulated within the walls and the hearth of the oven. If your modular oven is not well designed and isn’t made of refractory clay, you will find this process much harder.

In addition to featuring recipes by Charles Van Over, I will be sharing my own experimentations in the pizza oven. Lots of new recipes coming up, so stay tuned!

I wish you a very Happy New Year and may it be filled with “buon appetito!”

Enjoying the pizza oven outdoors.

In California we can pretty much entertain outdoors almost all year round and I find that owning a wood fired oven and cooking restaurant-quality food right at home, saves me money I would otherwise spend dining out with my family.

One reason is that making your own pizza dough is quick and you can definitely feed a lot of friends and family without breaking the bank. My husband and I always go back to this classic pizza napoletana dough recipe, even though we have researched and tried so many other doughs.

Another thing that I find myself doing a lot during the holidays is oven-baked bread, cookies, and other goodies to gift my neighbors and friends. This cantucci recipe is still a favorite for great tasting biscotti and because they keep longer than other home-made cookies. Dip them in chocolate for a truly festive look and taste:

Cantucci biscotti are so good when baked in a wood fired oven...

Chocolate Glaze

4 ounces of semisweet chocolate chips

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons light corn syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

In a double-boiler melt the chocolate chips and butter together, stirring often, until smooth. Stir in the corn syrup and vanilla. Dip half of each cookie into the melted chocolate and let dry for 30 minutes.

Happy Holidays! And may the new year be your best ever!

Pizza oven is fired up for the holidays!

Tuscan woods

Fall is the season for harvesting and storing, for bundling up and sitting around the fireplace. When I lived in Italy, the simple pleasures of harvesting started in late summer and early fall with mushrooms season, or as the Italians say andare a caccia di funghi, that is, going hunting for mushrooms. It meant hiking into the thick silence of the oak and chestnut woods, where the boars usually roamed undisturbed.

I was lucky that my neighbor, nonna Assunta, took me under her wing and brought me along. Nonna (grandma) Assunta lived a long life farming the land, overcoming incredible hardships with an indomitable spirit. Although 80 years old, she still worked 8 hours a day and pretty much left me in the dust when the carrying of bales of herbs was concerned. I loved listening to her and tried to absorb all she had to teach me. If late summer rains had brought about ideal conditions for mushrooms, she would lead me to her secret spots deep in the woods where we would harvest wild porcini and chanterelle mushrooms. We would victoriously head back home with our baskets full of our “hunt”, part of which was for enjoying fresh and most for drying.

Chanterelle Mushrooms

The woods around Oliveto, the small Tuscan village where I lived, were also rich in chestnuts, which we collected and roasted on the fire at night when the weather turned chilly. This is something you can do in a wood fired oven as well.

Wood-Fired Oven Roasted Chestnuts: Use a cast iron skillet or a metal pan, filling it with one layer of chestnuts that have been cut crosswise on top. Slide in the wood fired oven at 500 degrees and shake the skillet or pan a few times during the cooking period. When the skin of the chestnuts start to burnish and the cross cut opens, try one nut: if it feels soft when squeezed between the fingers, you know it is ready to enjoy. Fun to serve in small, brown bags!

Later in November it would be time for the olive harvest and, boy, this was hard work! In Tuscany the olives are pruned heavily to keep the trees small so that they can be harvested by hand. With the help of nets, ladders, and baskets one climbs each tree and running the hand over each individual branch collects the olive fruits. This method and the colder climate is what create the best olive oil on the planet, very low in acidity. We would try out the newly pressed oil on bruschettas, bragging that our oil was better than our neighbor’s!

Here’s a recipe for Wild Mushroom Bruschetta and while you are at it, check out the Holiday Turkey recipe on our website at www.losangelesovenworks.com as well, it will come in handy for Thanksgiving!

Wild Mushroom Bruschetta Serves 4 people

As it is hard to find wild mushrooms, I have adapted the recipe for Portobella mushrooms instead.

2 Portobella mushrooms, cut in half

For the seasoning

2 cloves of garlic, pressed

1 handful of Italian parsley, finely chopped

A few sprigs of fresh thyme and oregano, finely chopped

¼ cup virgin olive oil

2 teaspoons of balsamic vinegar

salt and pepper to taste

Place a pinch of salt and pepper in a small bowl and add the balsamic vinegar. Mix until the salt has dissolved. Add the herbs and the pressed garlic. Add the olive oil. Let sit for 30 minutes.

Fire up the wood fired oven. Let the fire burn down, this will take about one hour. Move the fire and embers to the right or the left side of the oven. Rake some of the coals of the fire to the front-middle of the oven. Place a free-standing grill over the coals for a few minutes before placing the halved mushrooms on it.

Brush lightly the halved mushrooms with the seasoning mix, then grill the mushrooms.When they are done, chop them and add them to the rest of the seasoning.Grill 4 slices of Italian bread. Add the mushrooms and seasoning on each grilled slice and serve. Buon appetito!