Posted by Adam Kuban, September 19, 2007 at 10:00 AM
Last week on Slice, I showed you some photos of a home-built backyard pizza oven in Kansas City with a promise that I'd try to chat with the builder. Here's the result, a quick interview with its builder-owner.
Name: Dan Curry
Age: 31
Location: Kansas City
Occupation: Lawyer
I've been told you used eight different kinds of brick and took seven months to build this oven. True?
Just two kinds of bricks, fire bricks, and a few regular bricks. I did use five different kinds of concrete.
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Posted by Adam Kuban, September 12, 2007 at 5:38 PM
A good friend of mine, Andy G., who lives in Kansas City and who I've known since college days, emailed me last Friday: "I'm going to my friend Dan's place for pizza tomorrow. He built his own backyard oven."
So earlier this week, Andy emails me a link to some photos of Dan's oven, along with this info:
It was amazing. Some of the best pizza I have ever had. He used a good dough recipe and made a great sauce from scratch. But the oven:
He used EIGHT different types of brick.
It took him over SEVEN months to build.
I was surprised by how fast the pizzas cooked. About three minutes per pie.
Of course, they were all small. He made about twenty by my estimates. Each
was different.
He used the plans from some restaurant in Australia.
It is unbelievable.
I'll see if I can contact Dan and get some more details on his amazing-looking oven. It's really beautiful.
Posted by Adam Kuban, August 20, 2007 at 3:15 PM
From last week's New York Times Travel section—Mario Batali and family kickin' it Michigan style. Naturally, the pizza-oven bits caught my eye. (That's Batali's imported wood-burner at right.)
Watching Mario Batali shovel a pizza topped with chopped tomatoes, wet chunks of fresh mozzarella and grilled artichokes into his crackling outdoor pizza oven, it is easy to imagine you are in a hill town outside Bologna, perhaps even in Borgo Capanne, where Mr. Batali apprenticed for three years at a trattoria. The surrounding spruce trees and the wind off the lake only add to the air of authenticity, as does the wood smoke that plumes out from the top of the brick oven and the smell of baking bread.
But, dude, get this: He's in Michigan. I know, right?
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