Homemade Wood-Fired Pizza Tonight? No Problem

Sometimes it is best to be spontaneous! While we talk a lot about 48-hour dough, and preparing on Thursday for weekend pizza, a Pizza-Porta allows you to throw a pizza party at the spur of the moment. Here are some ideas for having fantastic wood-fired pizza on the fly. Essentially a trip to the store and enough time to get a pizza stone heated up and you can have fantastic home-made pizza.

Restaurant Dough -

We called this a hack in other posts, but it sure is nice to pick up perfectly aged dough balls when you need them. Restaurants put great care into making consistently great dough. Just make sure you end up with dough balls that are 7.5oz- 8oz. Bam - you are ready to make pizza.

Grocery Store Dough -

Publix sells dough balls in the bakery. This is an easy way to get dough ready for cooking in the Pizza-Porta. The bagged variety is 16 oz. of dough. (We do not recommend the pre-flattened because it is way too thick.) When you get the bag home, cut it into 2 portions and ball them as you would your own dough. The tricky part with this dough is that Publix does a fantastic job activating the gluten. You need to give the gluten lots of time to settle down. Let the dough ball settle untouched covered on a countertop as it gets to room temperature. After it has settled, gently stretch it and you are ready to make pizza. Other grocery stores sell different varieties of dough - make sure it is 7-8oz. and nearly room temperature.

Day-Of dough -

You can make some of the best homemade pizza using this recipe from Ken Forkish. It takes a couple of interactions during the day, but the results are always fantastic.

Here is the recipe: Day-Of-Dough

Toppings

A quick run through the grocery store gets you Cheese, protein, and sauce. You can even find pre-made pizza sauce from Die Fratelli, Mutti, and others that is really tasty. Here are some ideas for you: Pizza Recipes

Oven -

The Pizza-Porta is easy to get up to temperature. Load with charcoal, light in a couple of places, install the deflector, stone and Pizza-Porta with the chimney and bottom vents fully open and in 30-40 minutes (time enough to get your ingredients set up) your wood-fired pizza oven is ready to cook. You don’t need gas to go fast.

Learn more about getting up to high temperature HERE

See our store: HERE