It has been almost a year since the last post because it has been a busy year. I’ve made pizza on three occasions since then but I didn’t get around to blogging the experience. It takes time and effort and lately I just felt too tired after making pizza to post a writeup with photos. Today is different and a good reason to get back into it.

In December of 2019, we went down to see the family of Sweet T for the holidays. I made pizza one night for everyone and it ended up being a huge success. We are visiting this year and I was asked if I could bake some pizza again. I agreed to do so because I can never say no to pizza but it got me thinking. Their oven doesn’t get up to 550°F like our oven does and there was considerable recharge time between each pizza. So much that some of the pizzas came out very undercooked on the bottom. What would really help this year is a hotter oven. Sounds like a great excuse to finally get around to buying a pizza oven.

I was considering between getting an Ooni and a Roccbox and ended up with the Roccbox. I’m going to need a lot of practice before the holidays and today was the first day of practice. I invited Niles and Little T over to sample the pizzas.

It was really cold today and I was unable to get the valve on the gas tank open. We tried every trick in the book to open it but we really needed a monkey wrench. All my good tools have been missing for a long time now and Niles couldn’t find a wrench either. He did have a gas tank with just enough gas left for today’s cooking and that is what we ended up using. It took way too long to get to this step:

With freezing weather at the moment, we were thinking it would take a long time to reach cooking temperature but it really didn’t take that long. We didn’t time it exactly but it seemed to be around 45 minutes.

With the oven being the new thing for today, I didn’t want to tweak anything with the dough or the sauce. For the cheese, I have now given up on using cheddar as part of the blend. It tends to break down too easily and the taste can dominate when too much is used. I’ve now been trying out these Colby Jack packets:

These are nice because I can use one of two of these and save the rest for the next time. When I was buying Monterey Jack blocks for the blend, I would use a little bit of it and the rest would go bad before having the chance to use it again.

I made enough dough for three pizzas and we needed all three. The first pizza ended up being a disaster. Here is what it looked like before going in the oven:

I got impatient and tried to turn the pizza too early. It wasn’t fully cooked enough on the bottom and the turning peel punched right through the bottom of the pizza. Molten cheese and sauce seeped through the hole and the pizza was a lost cause. It is better to cut the parachute at this point and deploy the reserve instead of trying to untangle this mess. I forgot to take a picture of the faulty pizza but I did get a nice photo of the reserve pizza:

These pizzas do bake quickly. The one side was a bit more charred than the other. Niles really likes the char but for others this might be a bit much.

The last pizza we loaded up with pepperoni, onions, and some banana peppers:

This didn’t end up being all the circular when transferred to the peel and it was too cold outside to spend too much time adjusting it. It came out looking like this:

The one side got a lot of char and that is because it was launched too deep in the oven. I found out that it is important to get the initial placement correct because the pizza can’t move until the underbelly has set. This one probably has too much char but Niles and I really enjoyed this one. The underbelly looked great too:

The practice session was an overall success and the pizzas were really delicious. I need to be able to feed nine people at Christmas time so I’ll probably be practicing every Sunday until then.