Unexpected Ways To Use Your Pizza Oven
NEWS
By SARA KLIMEK
Skillet Dessert
As your pizza oven cools off post-use, try making a dessert using its residual heat. You can easily bake a pie or an apple or berry crisp
or cobbler at about 350° F.
We suggest using a sturdy cast iron skillet, seeing as how pizza stones or the oven’s bottom will be hotter than the metal around it. Plus, the hot stone can shatter glass pans.
Focaccia
If you have leftover pizza dough, turn it into a focaccia. Bring the dough to room temperature, let it slack, stretch and dimple it with oil, and bake in the pizza oven.
Be sure to use a cast iron skillet. Focaccia usually needs to bake for 20 to 25 minutes at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, but you can tent it if it starts to get a little too brown.
Roasted Veggies
A pizza oven can roast veggies. It can char some veggies (like eggplants, red peppers, and tomatoes) and
use residual heat to cook others
(like zucchini and squash).
You should use a cast iron grill pan and try to stay around the 400 to 450 degrees Fahrenheit range for most vegetables. Keep an eye on them to ensure they don't get too toasty.
Flatbreads
Most home ovens don't offer the high temperatures required to make flatbreads, but pizza ovens do.
You can easily make naan, pita, and other flatbreads in a pizza oven.
Naan needs to be cooked at over 500 degrees Fahrenheit until it starts to blister. If you want to make pitas, be sure to turn your oven's heat down before you put them in.
Basque Cheesecake
Pizza ovens offer the high heat needed to make a Basque cheesecake. Once your infrared thermometer reads
600-800° F, shut the heat off
and put your cheesecake in.
Bake it for 45 minutes and let it set for hours afterward. You can use a spring-form pan, in which the Spanish
dessert is usually baked, ensuring it
can tolerate high temperatures.