Seth's Man Handles

Lisa gifted me an Ooni pizza oven a few years back. It does a nice job of heating up to nearly 1000F if you want it to. The bummer is you can’t properly cook a pizza in Ooni without a lot of “oven management”. Sadly if you crank that oven up and slide in pie you get burned tops and soggy bottoms easily.

The solution for me has been to let the oven preheat for a long time until the slate surface reaches 800F. Then, turn that thing off and cook the pie with retained heat. You still have to spin it and watch the crust carefully. When the crust looks 80% ready you can reignite the burners and finish the bake. This is what I typically get:

The second challenge with Oonis is its ability reheat for making another pie. At most dinner parties we make 4-5 different pies all with different toppings. To get ready for the next pie, I turn the burners back on high whilst we eat the first one. After 10-15 minutes it might be ready. But after each successive pie, the recovery time increases. It can’t keep up.

It might be time to upgrade to a wood fired oven with much more mass that can get hot and maybe cook several pies at once.

Here’s a high quality restaurant oven doing its thing at Emily (well regarded pizza in Brooklyn, NY started by our new friend Emily)

And, here’s a nice pie from Emily:

When we get to build our backyard deck, we’ll include some kind of outdoor kitchen area with such an oven. As inspiration, this was one at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala at the retreat center we stayed at a few weeks ago;

The owner told me it was built with lava sand taken from the area. Even when that oven was cranked up, the outer surface was cold. It really holds the heat in. He also described the parabolic design principle with these ovens. Essentially the curve of the dome is focusing the heat to an imaginary point below the baking surface.

Copied from Google search: Parabolic pizza oven design focuses on optimizing heat distribution, retention, and reflection, with a key principle being a dome height to radius ratio of roughly 85–90%. The parabolic, curved shape ensures that heat flows uniformly, reducing cold spots and providing consistent, high-temperature cooking for both the top and bottom of the pizza. 

Maybe I should build one?