Our record of 25 pizzas in one go has been broken – the record now sits at 32. Ok, 31.5 then because I got distracted and left one in the oven a bit long. Half of it was salvaged I’m pleased to report (the other half was on fire – and I do mean that literally).
Other than that we just had one that stuck to the work surface and had to be transformed into a calzone – been there, done that but not very often these days. A top result if I do say so myself.
Here you can see I’m wrestling with the oven door. Not really, but it was pretty windy and I was having to shelter the fire from the wind to stop it blowing ash all over the food. Suffering for my art? You bet – I’m all give give give, me.
The head torch is essential – it’s easy to miss the edges of the pizza starting to turn if you’re relying on the light from the flames. Talking of… had a pretty poor start with the oven, raked the embers out a little too early resulting in a load of charcoal being left in a patch at the back and never really got the temperature quite right after that.
Pizza Geek Junior plays no small part in all this. He helped me prep the toppings on the day (although I’d slaved for 7 hours the day before) and came shopping to get the San Marzano tomatoes and other ingredients. On the night he sorts all the pizzas and I sort the cooking – a good combo though I’m fancying role reversal!
On this occasion I thought we’d have a menu for people to go off – if you give them no choice at all they always fall into the 1970’s pizza topping trap “oh, I dunno, just a ham and pineapple please”. Confession: our ham & pineapple pizza tasted far better than it should!
<- And here’s the menu in question (click to view larger). A note about my Italian translation: this is not an exercise in vocabulary precision, think of it more like a shredded dictionary in a tombola. It served its purpose and was well received.
Faves amongst the guests were the Prawn Letdown, Caramel Goat and Filthy Fig. Try swapping the mozzarella for goat’s cheese on the fig one – very subtle tastes, definitely different.
One that’s not on the menu was the classic Neapolitana. Buffalo mozzarella, tomatoes and basil. We did this one first to see how the San Marzano tomatoes tasted (simple flavours) and I can tell you they’re well worth the 2.5x the price over normal toms.
Downside: 17 man-hours shopping, prepping, cooking.
Upside: Lots of happy, full guests. Result.
