I used to be already a home made pizza fanatic by the point we moved to Italy from London. Although I spent culinary faculty at Le Cordon Bleu learning wonderful French delicacies, my husband and I relied on easy weekly home made pizza nights to get us by way of the strict pandemic lockdown. It was throughout these weeks that become months that I experimented with and perfected my sourdough pizza recipe. As soon as lockdown eased, I traveled extensively round Italy to do analysis for the cookbook-memoir I used to be writing and to trace down my great-grandfather’s start certificates.
In November of 2020, we moved from London to Puglia in southern Italy to acquire my Italian twin citizenship, ancestry papers in hand. We discovered a tiny, unexceptional residence within the charming and picturesque medieval seaside metropolis referred to as Trani, within the heel of the boot.
In our new actuality, we weren’t solely confronted with the need of language proficiency (virtually nobody might converse English) but additionally adopting its foodways: a candy nibble and caffè for breakfast, a big and leisurely lunch (adopted by a nap), and dinner that began round 9 p.m.
It was dwelling there, strolling alongside the uneven cobblestones and respiration air that smelled of the Adriatic Sea, the place I started making and consuming one of the best pizzas of my life with the locals we befriended. I noticed my scrumptious dough was solely step one in direction of making an ideal pizza. It was additionally concerning the simplicity of the toppings, the contemporary, high quality components used, and, crucially: the attractive brick oven that baked the pizzas to perfection.
I realized that home made pizzas (mine included) could possibly be next-level scrumptious if I simply had entry to an especially sizzling oven, which cooks the dough extremely rapidly, due to this fact reaching a pillowy but blistered crust and impeccably just-melted cheese.
After we moved again stateside to Brooklyn, New York, with a kitchen oven that doesn’t transcend 500 °F, I believed my prime pizza-making days had been up to now. Then I found the Ooni Koda 16 Fuel Powered Pizza, a Wirecutter choose we’ve deemed “essentially the most handy and user-friendly moveable out of doors pizza oven we examined.” It delivers the excessive warmth my husband Connor says my dough “deserves,” in a handy and space-efficient system that matches on my terrace.
