A home pizza oven with SERIOUS juice and behind the scenes at the Briar Bar

The Churn for Friday, December 27, 2024

“You better cut the pizza into four pieces, because I'm not hungry enough to eat six.”— YOGI BERRA

In this week’s special holiday edition of The Heavy Table’s Churn newsletter, we make pizza at home at high temperatures and go behind the scenes at the Briar Bar in Northeast Minneapolis.

We’re back on our regular schedule next Friday, with a new edition of the Tap (for $10/month subscribers) and a new edition of the Hearth (for all paying subscribers.)

THIS IS MY ISLAND IN THE SUN
Or: some like it hot
By James Norton 

I dropped the phrase “hedonic treadmill” into a conversation with a well-heeled friend of mine and was rewarded with a knowing shake of the head and a “the struggle is real” sort of response. People with money truly understand the challenges caused by getting too much of what you want, whenever you want it: your preferences and tastes get so trained and specialized that fewer and fewer things are able to hit that smaller and smaller spot. A problem worthy of the world’s smallest violin, to be sure, but annoying nonetheless. 

The thing that I’ve become spoiled for and obsessed with isn’t an ingredient - I’m not on some constant, exhausting safari for better caviar or A5 wagyu or Maine lobsters or anything like that, although I’m a fan of all those things and could certainly stand to eat more. It’s hot food in restaurants. Not just hot, but piping hot. Lukewarm service of should-be-hot food is a meal ruiner at this point; I recently ordered a platter of Sizzling Beef at Tea House restaurant and got Room Temperature Beef instead, and I’m still irritated about it. 

By contrast, I ordered chicken fajitas at the new Los Ocampo on Marshall in Saint Paul (see the Hot Five below) and they came to the table positively engulfed in smoke, their cast iron platter a few degrees shy of actually glowing red. I can’t describe how happy this made me - the meat had all that delicious searing and  char, the vegetables were tender, the various fats and oils were fully liquid and excitingly active, not depressingly gelatinous. You could hear the platter from across the dining room.

This is a long walk to me saying that there’s a new pizza oven in my life, and I’m in love. Gourmia sent me an email pitching their new electric Multifunction Pizza Oven ($170) and I said, “sure, please send one over.” A friend has made me a few Ooni pizzas over the past several months that I’ve quite enjoyed and I was wondering if this indoor electric oven might be able to compete.

Brothers and sisters, it competes. The oven gets up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit without smoke or externally annoying heat. That means if you throw in a pizza you can watch it cook in about 90–120 seconds, the dough puffing up enthusiastically and the cheese browning while you watch. The experience is so rapid that it feels like you’re watching time-lapse photography. 

The resulting pizza (which I made with homemade dough, Rao’s pizza sauce, and conventional mozzarella) is some of the best I’ve had this year, 100% competitive with pizza served in respectable restaurants. Now: are my pizzas kinda lumpy and misshapen? No doubt, I’m an amateur when it comes to shaping the dough. But the finished product was perfectly chewy, beautifully browned, and touched with char. My (discerning, if not actively snobby) kids were totally delighted, as was I.

The oven comes with a number of settings (six pizza styles, plus an air fryer) and I haven’t exhaustively tested it. To be honest, I may not: I am so thoroughly impressed with the Neapolitan setting that it’s hard to imagine using it for anything else, at least until we’ve run this style into the ground.

The oven has its own removable pizza stone (a real plus) and thorough recipes and documentation. My only (minor) complaint is that its door is too small (at about 12 inches) for a standard pizza peel, so I ended up launching my dough from a tinfoil catering tray lid with the lip cut off. This would annoy me except that the solution cost me $0 and worked perfectly well. 

It brings me no end of satisfaction that when push comes to shove, I can always eat my sizzling beef leftovers out of an actively hot saute pan, and - finally - I can enjoy volcano temperature pizza in the comfort of my own kitchen.

A WAY WITH DOUGH: THE UPDATE

If you were pumped to try one of this winter’s upcoming Heavy Table / bakehouse baking classes (bagels with Martha Durrett, pasta with Eric Dregni, biscuits and orange rolls with Solveig Tofte, or fruit pies with Rachel Anderson) we have some bad news and some good news to share with you.

The bad news: Our bagels and biscuits classes have sold out.

The good news: We still have tickets remaining for fresh pasta class with Eric Dregni and our fruit pie class with Rachel Anderson … for now, at least! Grab tickets while you still can over on bakehouse’s website.

FRESH PASTA WITH ERIC DREGNI - SATURDAY, JANUARY 25, 10am

About the Class: Eric Dregni writes: "Emilia-Romagna has the best food in Italy. Yes, those are fighting words for Italians, but they will grudgingly admit it's true. First comes the fresh pasta, in particular tagliatelle, tortellini, and lasagne. We will talk about the history and kinds of pasta and then make our own fresh pasta."

About the Instructor: Dregni is professor of English, journalism, and Italian at Concordia St. Paul and the dean of the Italian Concordia Language Village, Lago del Bosco. He worked in Italy as a travel journalist and his essays were compiled into a book in Italian, Grazie a Dio non sono bolognese, later translated into English as Never Trust a Thin Cook. He’s the author of 20 books and leads trips to Italy and Norway nearly every year. 

FRUIT PIES WITH RACHEL ANDERSON - SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 10am

About the Class: We’ll focus on “Pie Dough 101” with fruit-based pie filling and learn how to make an all-butter pie crust with a customizable fruit filling. Students will learn how to approach pies with easily adjustable ratios to make fruit pies all year round. 

About the Instructor: Rachel Anderson has been the owner of Vikings and Goddesses since 2019. Since moving to Minnesota from New York City, Anderson has worked at notable restaurants such as Bellecour, Birchwood Cafe, and Revival.

HEAVY TABLE’S HOT FIVE

Jeanne Lakso / Heavy Table

#5 Com Gai Hai-Nam at My Huong Kitchen | Minneapolis

While the dine-in lunch crowd at family-run My Huong Kitchen honed in on the well-priced banh mi, pho, and egg rolls, I ordered a plate of Hainanese chicken rice ($12.95). It’s serious Asian comfort food: a mound of beautifully cooked jasmine rice tossed with plenty of juicy chicken (mostly breast), an abundance of crispy fried shallots, and a generous handfuls of cilantro.