For the past ten years or so, I’ve been trying to make really good pizza at home. To that end, I’ve used numerous recipes for the dough and a few pieces of kitchen gear. The one dough that worked best for me was Roberta’s dough, for which the recipe can be found on the New York Times “Cooking” website.

As far as equipment goes, the two items that got the most use were both focused on achieving the right heat for baking the pizza. My first purchase was Breville’s Crispy Crust Pizza maker, which the manufacturer touts being able to bring the included pizza stone “to a fierce 572°.”

It worked quite well, but it wasn’t the easiest to clean and took up considerable space.

Soon after that, however, I read about a steel replacement for a pizza stone aptly called the Baking Steel, which is manufactured by a company by the same name. They claimed: “Our steel technology heats your pizza just like a 900° pizza oven would. Leaving you with the perfect pizza. Crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.”

And I must say that the Baking Steel pretty much worked as described. In fact, it worked so well that I gave my Breville pizza maker away.

Both pieces of gear were fine for apartment-sized kitchens, but two years ago when we moved to a town house with a spacious kitchen and a large deck with a natural-gas fitting, I started looking at outdoor pizza ovens. The advantage they have over indoor ovens is that they can reach temperatures over 900°F that allow one cook a pizza in 90 seconds.

Ooni appeared to offer the best ones, but were rather expensive. If we went ahead with the purchase, would the Ooni just be one more piece of equipment that would join the plethora of other gear that got relegated to storage. We put the idea on the back burner. At a COVID-delayed Christmas gift exchange, however, our friends surprised us with the top-of-the-line Ooni along with a natural-gas conversion kit and a slew of other accessories. I was gobsmacked.

We waited until the spring to set it up, but in the interim, I read books and surfed the web going through Reddit subs devoted to Ooni and Pizza as well as YouTube videos on pizza dough making and stretching. My research was becoming, and perhaps still is, an obsession.

Among the books I’ve consulted are:

• The Neapolitan Pizza: A Scientific Guide about the Artisanal Process by Paolo Massi
• The Elements of Pizza by Ken Forkish

The Reddit subs and websites include:

• Ooni Pizza Ovens
• https://www.reddit.com/r/ooni/
• A Place to Chat about All Things Ooni
• https://www.reddit.com/r/uuni/
• Pizza
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/
• Pizza Making Forum
• https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php
• Ooni Pizza Ovens
• https://ooni.com/

The individual who has inspired me most, however, is Vito Iacopell. His You Tube channel has become an almost daily visit.

To date, we used the oven about once a week and have made over a dozen pizzas, some more successful than others, but none of them a failure. My goal has been to make a traditional Neapolitan pizza and I haven’t yet tried to make any of the other popular varieties like New York-, Buffalo-, Chicago- or even Sicilian-style.

So far, I have used three recipes for the dough. My first was Ken Forkish’s  “Saturday Pizza Dough,” which allows one to make pizza in a process that takes about 30 minutes total broken up over six stages throughout the day, each about 5 minutes.  One can start at 9AM and have pizza ready by 6PM.

Here are a few of the pizzas I’ve made with this recipe:

The second recipe I’ve used is “Outdoor Pizza Oven Pizza Dough” by Andrew Janjigian:

https://www.seriouseats.com/basic-pizza-dough-for-high-temperature-outdoor-pizza-ovens-5211302

 It’s a dough that’s specifically formulated for high-temperature (800-900°F) outdoor pizza ovens. This recipe as well is rather simple and can even be made in a food processor but requires a 24 to 48-hour cold fermentation, so planning is necessary.

Here are a couple I’ve made with this recipe:

My most recent recipe is from Vito Iacopelli. It’s perhaps been  the most challenging for me because  its high hydration value, that is, the ratio of water to flour. In this recipe, it’s between 65 to 70%. As a result, the dough is rather sticky and can be difficult to work. So far, I’ve only made his single ball version, but because of weather I was forced to use my indoor oven preheated to 550°F and  fitted with a baking steel.

Here’s what my first attempt with this recipe looked like:

It was good, but since the heat wasn’t as high as an outdoor oven, the crust didn’t have the poof I was trying for and because of the longer indoor cooking time 8 to 10 minutes as opposed to the outdoor 90 seconds, the toppings were a little overdone.

My next attempt will be his “Next Level Pizza Dough” which will most likely be the subject of a future post. The video describes the process.

Wish me luck.