Pizza perfection

I confess. I have slack blogging periods. The Christmas holiday period has been one. It has been in my mind for weeks to blog the best pizza session ever. After a month I finally got here! For Christmas our family decided to have a gourmet food festival with each family member contributing something to the festivities. We kicked this off on Christmas Eve with a feast of barbecued delights including fantastic ribs with chipotle barbecue sauce and home-made gozleme. On Christmas morning we kicked on with our usual alfresco barbecue breakfast. It just went on from there as each of us prepared a variety of wonderful dishes to delight and nourish.

One of the high points of this festival of indulgence happened the day I lit the pizza oven. It was quite a warm day but not as hot as we had been experiencing, and there was no total fire ban. I lit the oven early and kept a pretty large fire going for about 4 hours. By the time we got to cooking the oven was the hottest it has ever been. I discovered the following day that I had actually broken our little oven thermometer.

We started with our usual roasting tray of lamb chops. These cooked perfectly in less than two minutes and were gobbled up as soon as we could physically touch them. Next I put in some gozleme our girls had made using leftover fillings from Christmas Eve. This was a mistake as the yoghurt in the gozleme dough burnt quite badly. They tasted really good however once the burnt bits were cut off.

That evening pizza was definitely the star of the show. Jenni and Luke made a batch of pizza dough and took great care to roll out the thinnest crusts possible. Using a variety of toppings we ended up baking at least 12 fantastic pizzas. Luke even managed a cheese stuffed crust pizza. With the incredible heat of the oven these pizzas cooked perfectly in no time and all tasted wonderful. The final pizzas were topped with pear and chocolate and with apple and cinnamon.

This night has entered the annals of our family food legends.