An oven can be your family reunion machine, I'll call it.
My name is Giuseppe Colosimo, and I build pizza ovens.
In the oven you can cook anything:
meat, fish, bread, pizza, pastizzi,
spanakopita, anything.
We’re outside now and I'm going to show you
how to light up the oven without using any chemicals.
Just a bit of paper and some really nice kindling.
You prepare your timber like this, you can’t go wrong.
Number one, you put a bit of paper on the bottom,
put some small pieces and just build,
like what I say, a little castle.
Just crisscross them together like this.
They'll make everything easier to catch fire.
And then all you do is just...
If you are thinking to buy an oven or get an oven built,
number one, you're going to see how much space you have.
It’s either if you have a bench already made in concrete or brick
so you can put your base or alternately you can have
a steel frame made up and build the oven on top.
You've always got to allow for the weight of the oven,
which range from 250 kilograms up to one and a half tonnes.
Talking about size, these are medium-duty ovens,
which can be used for a restaurant, almost.
But for home
you probably want to stick with one of
the little ones that you can put two pizzas at a time.
And that will do the job.
You can almost do anything with that one.
I always cook at home.
Christmas, Easter,
weekends, when I’m free,
always cook something.
It brings the family together, too, the oven.
It really does.
I've got three little kids.
My oldest one is 14 and she's already into pizza.
She's doing the dough already,
she's stretching, she's cooking.
Even the little one, 11 years old, already on the oven.
An oven can be your family reunion machine,
I'll call it.
Once you've got the oven running like this,
you can move everything on one side.
And a little tip, how to clean the floor.
You don't need a mop.
All you need is your paddle.
Just tap the floor.
And you can see
it cleans by itself.
If you don't know when the oven is ready,
I can tell you, you don’t need a thermometer
because just think, looking at the dome,
as you can see,
the bottom now is white here, but it's black on the top.
When the oven is ready, the dome would turn white again.
So the smoke would disappear
when the oven reaches about 300 degrees.
As you can see,
the oven’s getting to temperature,
the black is going,
the white is coming.
A lot of people think the flue is in the middle of the oven,
but the flue is not in the middle of the oven.
The flue is outside of the dome,
because if you have a hole in the dome,
all the heat will escape through the flue.
So you force all your fire to stay in the dome.
And then the excess smoke goes into the flue,
which is a void on the front of the oven.
With the smoke, the first 15-20 minutes,
until everything gets to temperature,
there's a bit of smoke.
And it all depends on what timber or what wood you use.
Dry wood and that’s it.
Anything wet or with a lot of moisture
is going to make a lot of smoke.
Now, a little tip when you go to get pizza.
When you get a slice of pizza and it stays like this,
it's a good pizza.
You don't want the pizza to limp.
If it limps, no good.
Now, I grew up in a little village
in southern Italy, in the mountains, in a farm,
and my Nonna used to cook almost every week in the wood oven.
Most was bread,
and then they used to do the pizza in the tray,
like the really puffy one.
And obviously they used to cook chicken,
they used to cook potatoes in there, they used to cook lamb.
I got a big memory about my grandfather and my grandmother.
Big memory about them, yeah.
That's what gave me the...
the strength to be here today.
One more little tip:
once your fire is completely died
and the oven is about 150 or 200 degrees,
you get your wood for next time.
You put it in the oven,
put the lid,
and you bake it.
So next time your wood will be 100 per cent dry.
So here we go, your oven is ready for cooking,
and it will stay hot for the next 24 hours.
As we say in Italy,
‘Buon appetito’.