I follow a Facebook page called Pizzaholics. It’s all about pizza. Every once in a while someone posts a picture of their home pizza oven. This usually starts a rant from people who denounce personal pizza ovens. Most of the time people say they’d rather buy a $15 pizza then make a $100 pizza. What they’re insinuating is that if you purchase a $4000 pizza oven and make 40 pizzas, each will cost a ridiculous amount of money. Unfortunately, these people are missing the point. It’s really not about the pizza, it’s about the experience. We bought an oven about a year ago from https://fornopiombo.com. Just before placing the order, I was questioning how often we’d use it. We have a friend who is on his third pizza oven and after all these years, he still uses it most weekends. It really is a great night. 10-20 different pizzas are cooked through the night and everyone shares. These invites is what prompted me to buy our own and I don’t regret it for a minute. Give me one activity where your high school and college age children want to hang out all night with their parents? Better yet, besides taking pictures of their pizzas or changing the music, they’re off their phones too. Pizza ovens are all about family, they’re all about friends. Yes, you can purchase a propane fired oven that’s ready in minutes but we wanted an authentic, wood fired oven. It takes anywhere from 1-2 hours to get the oven hot enough for cooking. Once at temp, pizzas will be ready quicker than you can prep them. Pizzas are cooked in about 90 seconds. For our setup, we purchased metal legs from https://carolinalegco.com/collections/metal-legs. We then welded cross bars and dropped a granite slab on top of the base. This is at counter height so people can sit around it if they’d like. To get the oven at the preferred shoulder height, we had a custom corten steel box that not only raises the height of the oven but provides a dry storage area for kindling, paper, lighters, and the all important laser temperature gun.
Our Forno Piombo pizza oven is creating family memories. We’ve had our oven for a year and we try to use it once a week. We don’t always have the time but this weekend, we’ve had it going 3 straight nights and we’ve had different people each night.
