Booth Bay Dinner Theatre & Movie

Last week our oven broke, which led to us using Kerri’s mum’s oven, which broke in a different way, which led to disastrous results. This week we had a new oven installed. The most interesting thing about it was that it goes up to 270C! This meant that we had to try pizza in it, because our old oven with its rather rubbish temperatures just wasn’t hot enough to make reasonable pizza.

To save time, last night we made our usual pizza dough, and then after it had done its fifteen minutes rising, we put it into the fridge overnight. This evening we looked in the fridge and the two neat balls of dough had risen further while resting in the fridge and had joined together. We were worried we had ruined the dough, but we made two new balls out of it and put them in a warm place for a while where they plumped up again.

Of course the next thing to do was to turn the oven up to 270 and wait for it to heat up. While we did this, we made our tomato sauce out of San Marzano tomatoes as per the link for the pizza dough above. We also had some Laverstoke Park Farm British buffalo mozzarella (yes!), a few really spicy olives, some leftover rosemary-scented ham and some roasted red peppers. All this went on; the peppers and olives in an orderly fashion followed by the ham and mozzarella in a rather random fashion. Which was fine since the pizza had turned out into a rather mis-shapen square anyway.

We also made some garlic bread, since the dough recipe makes enough for two pizzas. Both were really really good. Nice and thin and crispy with really crunchy crusts. We put it down to a combination of getting the dough right and having it rise till it was nice and light, combined with the higher temperature of our new oven. It’s still not as high as a proper pizza oven, but it did a good job and we only had to cook them for a few minutes each until the cheese was bubbling and the edges were browning.

I experimented with different flavoured Halen Môn salt on the garlic bread – the celery salt went particularly well, giving it both herbal and spicy notes.