Cedar Hollow Dorset
Lighting the pizza oven
Allow forty-five minutes before you want to eat. The oven is not difficult, it is only slow — and the first pizza is always the worst one.
- Dorset
- Plan your stay
- Lighting the pizza oven
Logs, kindling, firelighters and flour are supplied. Bring your own tomato purée and toppings, or order frozen dough from the woodland shop — pre-ordered dough is left in your fridge to defrost on the day you arrive.
Building the fire
- Make a flat square bed of kindling in the middle of the oven floor, put one firelighter on top, then stack more kindling over it into a cube.
- Light the firelighter. Mind your hand — the opening is lower than it looks.
- When that first stack has burned down, pile more kindling on top, wigwam-fashion or simply heaped, and keep doing it until you have a good bed of red-hot embers.
- Lay small, dry, split logs on the embers and let them burn until hot embers cover most of the oven floor. This is the part that takes the time, and it cannot be hurried.
- Use the Morso ash scraper to sweep all the embers to the side and the back of the oven, clearing the floor you will cook on.
- Keep one piece of kindling burning on the embers at the side, replacing it with the tongs as it goes. The flame licking across the curved roof is what cooks the top of the pizza.
Cooking
A pizza takes between one and three minutes depending on how hot the oven has got. Turn it once, halfway, and do not walk away — at this temperature the difference between perfect and charcoal is about twenty seconds.
The first pizza is frequently the least successful one. Treat it as a test, and make it the one with the fewest toppings on.
Never pour cold water on the oven to cool it down. The thermal shock cracks the dome, and that is a rebuild rather than a repair.
Do not use the oven door while you are firing it. The door is for closing the opening after you have finished, not for controlling the burn.
Afterwards
Let the embers go out and cool overnight on their own. Leave the ash where it is — we clear it on changeover, and a warm oven will still be warm in the morning.
Never leave the oven burning unattended, and keep the fire inside the oven where it belongs.
Dough, cider, kindling
The woodland shop runs on an honesty system and is open whenever you are.