Indoor Brick Pizza Oven

There was a great article in the LA Time this week - "A Pizza Parlor in Your Kitchen". We immediately went to a building supply yard to find fire bricks and built our own brick oven. Here's our version:Note to my Doughboys - how about baking our rustic bread in this brick oven?

Here's a link to a video of the Times version:
http://www.latimes.com/video/?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipId=3580381

I decided that for our first experiment to use the pizza dough recipe in the article. Next time I'll use a bigger bowl!

Lia made the tomato sauce (smooshed canned San Marzano tomatoes mixed with olive oil, salt and pepper: John grated the cheeses:Lia & I took turns rolling out the dough:Assembling a Pizza Margherita - tomato sauce, fresh basil and fresh mozzarella:Into the brick oven it goes:

Our next pizza was with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, prosciutto and arugula:
We also made one with spicy Calabrese salami and this one "Cacio e Pepe" - cheese & pepper:
We were very happy with the results. The crust didn't brown as much as the pizza in the video, but it was very crispy, especially on the bottom, and delicious!!

Next time we will change the brick configuration by raising the ceiling up one rung and adding more bricks so the convection fan won't be blocked by the bricks.

Lia gave the pizzas a big thumbs-up, but then again she tells us she doesn't drink, hmmmm.....