Introducing the Ooni Karu
Jul 5, 2020
Lockdown
I’ve been planning on writing a blog about my home cooking experiments for a while now. But I didn’t expect that finally getting around to doing it would be driven by a global pandemic. I also didn’t expect my first post to start with words about Coronavirus, COVID-19, or Lockdown! But here we are. In the middle of a global pandemic, and confned to home by the government.
If I’m honest, I’ve been incredibly lucky throughout the entire affair. I’ve saved money by not travelling into the office each day, not buying breakfast and lunch in the town centre, not filling the car with fuel each week, etc. But being confined to home and the garden is still restrictive and gets a bit boring, so I decided to treat myself and finally buy that pizza oven I’d been thinking about for months… The Ooni Karu.
The Karu is a wood, charcoal, or gas powered portable pizza oven. It comes with the ability to use wood or charcoal out of the box, and there is an additional gas burner that can be added. Stock of pretty much everything Ooni was massively limited during lockdown, so I ended up with the Karu itself but no gas burner for a couple of weeks. I set about cooking with wood, using kindling that I already had for starting the log burner at home.
Burning Wood
Lighting the fire couldn’t be easier. I little bit of paper to get started and the kindling on top took straight away. Adding more kindling as it started to burn down and th overn was up to cooking temperature in a little over 20 minutes. As a novice to the wood fired pizza overn game I would say the toughest part was thinking about topping the wood up to keep the fire burning and manage the oven temperature, whilst also stretching the dough, topping the pizza, getting it on the peel and back off again into the oven without it sticking anywhere. But I definitely managed it.
I made two pizzas on the maiden voyage, a classic margherita (obviously!) and a pepperoni and mushroom, with nduja on my half for a touch of heat! I’ve been cooking pizza for a long time, and these were by far the best I’ve ever made. The searing heat and the stone make a massive difference. They were in the oven for probably around 90 seconds each.
Improvements
Number one: Dough! I’ve been making fresh dough for pizzas for years, usually based on Jamie Oliver’s recipe. It’s always been good enough, but I think experimenting with dough is my first major improvement to be found. I’ve done a bit of reading already and dough seems to be an artform of it’s own.
Hydration percentages, yeast types, flour strength, oil or no oil… I’ve now got two different apps dedicated solely to experimenting with pizza dough ingredient percentages, but I’ve never been a fan of following recipes so something tells me I’ll end up settling on something entirely bespoke!
Number two: Sauce. I’ve always used a sun-dried tomato paste as the base for my pizzas as I find pizza sauce either too boring or too herby, but as I’m making better pizzas and using better ingredients it seems like the sun-dried tomato paste is too overpowering. I’ll experiment with some basic pizza sauces, and hopefully get some of the San Marzano tomatoes that I keep reading about to see if they’re all they claim to be!