We had designed and built an outdoor fireplace with the intent of eventually making Fireplace Pizza. After about a year delay, we finally tried it the other day, and the outcome was so good, that people want to be us. This place is fun because we are not afraid to try new things.
We’re telling you this because among other things, we like surrounding ourselves with art, literature, things of beauty, and nice flavors and fragrances. We call all of this “Human Scale Living”. Having a nice outdoor fireplace with nice food is a component of that.
The success of our Fireplace Pizza was heavily dependent on the intensity of the fire, the conditioning of the pizza stone we used, and of course the cooking time, which decreased as we got better at positioning the food on the cooking surface.
The Outdoor Fireplace Project
To make a very long story short, there was a place on the property that was so nondescript that no one bothered to take a picture of it. About a year ago we launched a project to upgrade it. For background information here is the post:
https://www.fireflymadison.com/2021/01/14/outdoor-fireplace-build/
Outdoor Fireplace Cooking
We installed a rack on this thing so we could do outdoor fireplace cooking. The intent of this was to have it be surrounded by happy, buzzing people. Some nice food and fun would happen, and it would be warm and inviting.
We tried this about a year ago with pork chops with fresh rosemary, and this proved to be the best idea ever.
Here’s another link.
Fireplace Pizza
Since pizza is social food, and adds a little class to the place, we set out to make some Fireplace Pizza. In theory, if we were to get good at this, it would be a go-to ongoing party food at this lovely spot.
The pizza is less about the pizza method than it is about the outdoor cooking. Here are the steps.
Crust Mixing for Fireplace Pizza
Sorry for underachieving on the crust on this. The crust of choice was pre-fab from the store, where you just have to add water. We did this for the test run because it was simpler.
We wanted to remove this as a complication. Since we are about incremental complications, the next time we attempt this, we will use flour, water, maybe a little oil, and yeast. Yes we have been tempted to use almond flour but that will be a job for another day.
PS: Our absolute favorite pizza dough is from Il Refugio Perfetto, who does this stuff so beautifully that we shouldn’t even attempt it, but we’re going to.
Here’s a link, by the way, to Il Refugio Perfetto, because she does pizza dough and bread as beautiful as any done anywhere.
Crust Rising
You’re supposed to wait an hour or two in order to get this to rise a little, which we did.
Fire Starting
This was surprisingly hard. The weather in the winter around here tends to be cool and clammy. Any wood left outside gets soggy, and is a poor choice for firewood.
After a lot of experimentation we arrived at the right log size (no bigger than 3 inches) kindling (dried sticks and leaves. Oak leaves are poor kindling.) The lighting device was a bic lighter, which is inadequate. Lesson learned: try to be faster on this.
The Sauce
It was originally proposed to use canned pizza sauce. But, there was refinement. A lovely sauce using fresh basil and oregano and fresh onion was whipped up. Sometimes you have to go with the flow.
The Protein
Sweet Italian Sausage and some generic name brand Mozzarella cheese. Are we happy about the use of “normal” ingredients for this? Not especially, but this was more about the process this time. Next time we will upgrade.
Preparation
The test pizza was rolled out onto the counter, with a little flour to keep it from sticking, which it failed to do. The goo, namely the sauce, cheese, and sausage, was dropped onto it.
The cosmetically deficient test pizza was scraped off of the counter, and loaded onto an expendable pizza stone.
Side point: Do we need to tell you the quantities of each of these ingredients? The correct answer in this case is “enough”. We put “enough” sauce, “enough” cheese, and “enough” sausage that it looked like a pizza, as you can see.
If this were a cook book, which it might be someday, I would just tell you “enough.”
Loading
With the whole setup relatively cold, it was loaded onto the rack. There was a friendly fire going on underneath, the surface of the cooking stone got reasonably hot, and we were looking good.
Unloading the Fireplace Pizza
From the time we loaded the pizza to the time it was unloaded it was about 15 minutes. Stone and all were removed from the oven, the pizza was scraped off with a spatula, and we were ready for #2.
Fireplace Pizza Improvements
The first thing we did was start building the pizza right on the stone, including (carefully) smoothing the dough while the stone was still warm. Therefore the risk of stickiness by 75% since we only had to remove it.
As the pizza stone got hotter, the cooking time got lower. By the end of all of this the cooking time was more like 10 minutes. Also the surface of the stone got conditioned and by the fourth pizza, it was readily falling off with the spatula.
Also, we found out we could cut the cooking time if we pre-cooked the sausage, which is a good idea anyway.
Pizza number 4 looked and tasted exactly like a real pizza, because that is what it was.
Do Over: Fireplace Pizza
According to the pizza tasting experts who tasted this first attempt, the results were declared “lovely.” There are a couple of things we would do better.
Aside from fire building improvements, we could use one of those paddles. We’d build the pizza on the paddle with a little panko, shoosh it onto the stone, and then shoosh it off. That would keep the stone hotter, and allow even faster cooking.
If we had to do it over, the pre-cooked sausage was much better. We may attempt Margherita next time with fresh basil and nice chicken. We even have a candidate chicken, namely the pesky chicken who stole some of our salad while this was going on.
The Il Refugio Perfetto recipe will be used, because we can.
We would estimate that if we had a second stone, we could more than double production. We could probably crank out 2 pizzas every 15 minutes, and this would be enough for the size of gathering we normally have.
One more question: Why?
Well, you may well ask, if there is Marcos uptown, that will deliver a commercial pizza to us without work, why would we go through the effort of making fireplace pizza?
The first answer is, because that is what we do. This is because we believe in the handmade, one off, and doing something out of the box. Where else can you get a pizza that was made by the same people that made the oven? Maybe we will go so far as to use some fresh tomatoes, once we get them this spring.
The second answer is, that we like a good story. The story of how we made Fireplace Pizza is a good story.
PS: Here’s a link: Have we told you lately that we’re published authors?
http://www.fireflymadison.com/books
