How Not to use A Pizza Oven

Clearly those closest to me know me well, because for my birthday today I received a beautiful (portable: it packs into a bag!) wood-fired pizza oven, which I immediately assembled, test-fired, cleaned, and prepped with the intention of feeding everybody some homemade pizza using some of Robin‘s fabulous bread dough, this evening.

Ooni Fyra portable wood-fired pizza oven.

Fuelled up with wood pellets the oven was a doddle to light and bring up to temperature. It’s got a solid stone slab in the base which looked like it’d quickly become ideal for some fast-cooked, thin-based pizzas. I was feeling good about the whole thing.

But then it all began to go wrong.

Animated GIF showing the fire blazing as seen through the viewing window on the front of the oven.
The confined space quickly heats up to a massive 400-500ºC.

If you’re going to slip pizzas onto hot stone – especially using a light, rich dough like this one – you really need a wooden peel. I own a wooden peel… somewhere: I haven’t seen it since I moved house last summer. I tried my aluminium peel, but it was too sticky, even with a dusting of semolina or a light layer of oil. This wasn’t going to work.

I’ve got some stone slabs I use for cooking fresh pizza in a conventional oven, so I figured I’d just preheat them, assemble pizzas directly on them, and shunt the slabs in. Easy as (pizza) pie, right?

Pizza on fire in oven.
Within 60 seconds the pizza was cooked and, in its elevated position atop a second layer of stone, the crust began to burn. The only-mildy-charred bits were delicious, though.

This oven is hot. Seriously hot. Hot enough to cook the pizza while I turned my back to assemble the next one, sure. But also hot enough to crack apart my old pizza stone. Right down the middle. It normally never goes hotter than the 240ºC of my regular kitchen oven, but I figured that it’d cope with a hotter oven. Apparently not.

So I changed plan. I pulled out some old round metal trays and assembled the next pizza on one of those. I slid it into the oven and it began to cook: brilliant! But no sooner had I turned my back than… the non-stick coating on the tray caught fire! I didn’t even know that was a thing that could happen.

Flames flickering at the back of a pizza oven.
Hello fire. I failed to respect you sufficiently when I started cooking. I’ve learned my lesson now.

Those first two pizzas may have each cost me a piece of cookware, but they tasted absolutely brilliant. Slightly coarse, thick, yeasty dough, crisped up nicely and with a hint of woodsmoke.

But I’m not sure that the experience was worth destroying a stone slab and the coating of a metal tray, so I’ll be waiting until I’ve found (or replaced) my wooden peel before I tangle with this wonderful beast again. Lesson learned.

Animated GIF showing the fire blazing as seen through the viewing window on the front of the oven.× Pizza on fire in oven.× Flames flickering at the back of a pizza oven.× Ooni Fyra portable wood-fired pizza oven.×

Note #18069

Can you tell me how to get in touch with your technical/security team @firstdirecthelp? Apparently my report about a vulnerability in your website contains characters that aren’t “valid” for your sucky feedback form… but it doesn’t say which ones.

Best Before

Thanks, supermarket bagels, for expressing exactly how I was feeing when I reached the kitchen this morning:

Label: Best Before 8 Jan 2021.

Look at Banner, Dan!

First thing I saw when I came downstairs this morning:

Happy Birthday banner with handwritten cardboard "Dan" sign hung underneath.

Totally a banner especially for my birthday, today, and not a repurposed decoration from Annabel’s yesterday.

Context for the oblivious:

Happy Birthday banner with handwritten cardboard "Dan" sign hung underneath.×

Story Time

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

First frame of "Story Time" comic from Channelate. An old man sits in an armchair and talks to two small children sitting on the floor in front of him. The old man says "I ever tel you squirts about the year 2020?"

When this comic (go read the full thing) came out at the tail end of last year, I thought to myself: yeah, that’s about right. I’m resharing that on my birthday in a week or so.

‘Cos I’m forty today, and I sort of had a half-baked dream that I’d throw some kind of big party and get people together. My surprise party for my thirtieth birthday party was an excellent (and much-needed) bash, and I guess I’d thought I’d try to replicate the feel of that, but a decade on (and not a surprise party… although in the end the last one wasn’t either).

But 2020’s the year that keeps on giving, so I’m postponing my party plans to… “some other time”. And so this comic really spoke to me.