Kettle Pizza.. Small but effective.. that’s what she said

I’m upgrading my oven next year when I build a pool to a Gozney Dome. For pizza sauce i either make from scratch or use Raos

 

I would personally make my own sauce because:

1. It's usually cheaper, and I'm a tight@ss
2. Canned sauces tend to be a little too sweet for my taste (added sugars because it appeals to more people - especially kids)
3. You can modify the taste of canned sauces to your liking, but at that point, you might as well have started from scratch.
4. My wife would say to me, "you used to be an Executive Chef at fine dining restaurants, and you're using canned sauce?"

That being said - nothing beats Taco Bell for cheap Mexican! There's something to be said about using rolled oats in the ground beef that can't be duplicated!

 

This Kettle Pizza product is new to me and I just checked out their website (https://www.kettlepizza.com/) ... may look into getting one of these for my grill for pizza and bread as my oven can barely reach 480ºF. Thanks for sharing.

 

Those "rolling" pizza ovens at Pizza Hut (there are still a few left) are like the roller version of high temp pizza ovens. The center would burn at about 800 degrees. I believe the PH ones were customized with some kind of "algorithm" - ie. it wasn't 800 degrees all the way through (there was a "ramp up temp" at the beginning, and a "ramp down temp" as it came out.

I was thinking of making a wood burning one myself. It's not too hard, but you need firebrick (which is plentiful in New England) and high temp mortar.

One of the key things if you make your own is to have a porous bottom - something that will absorb the excess moisture from the bottom of the crust. When you have super high heat (ie. 800-900 degrees), the sudden "shock" of heat will cause the moisture in the pizza and toppings outward. In other words, the moisture in the toppings and sauce will want to escape upwards, but the moisture/water in the dough will try to escape downward (in other words, the moisture tries to escape from the center outward - like what happens to steak.

If the bottom is a solid piece of steel, for example, it will trap the moisture within the crust, so you're not going to get a good crisp crust at the bottom. With a porous bottom (firebrick, quarry tile, etc.) it will be able to absorb the excess moisture.

 

This is really key. Something like a baking steel is great in a regular oven, because it doesn't get up to the same heat as a proper pizza oven. Once you get into the 700*+ range, that porous bottom is really important