Pizza Night at Kalikalos

For 2 weeks now I have wanted to make pizza in the woodfire oven here at Kalikalos. Eventually on Thursday night I found a group of people who were keen to try and cook pizza. We came home early from the beach in order to get started !
Since none of us had ever cooked using an oven like this before, we had to refer to YouTube in order to find out how it worked!

To start, a couple of hours before you want to cook in the oven, you need to build a good fire in the oven so that the stones get hot enough to cook the pizza on! After the fire has burnt down, you push the hot embers aside and then the bottom of the oven is hot enough to cook on (this is a simplified version)! We made our own pizza dough and then put on a range of toppings including local olives, tomatoes and goats cheese (which was made by a man down the road just 3 days ago)!

When the pizzas were ready to be cooked we carried them over to the oven, and then had to figure out how to get them in the oven. This proved harder then first thought ...someone had to hold a torch so that we could see what we were doing while someone had to try and slide the pizza in! What we did not realize prior to this, was that the base of the oven was quite uneven, which made it quite difficult to slide the pizza into the oven and remove it once cooked. A couple of times it looked like our nice toppings would slide into the oven without the pizza base, and we only just rescued it in time! However, after 4 hours, we had a fine selection of pizzas, in various shapes and sizes, but all tasted amazing!

There is something about eating food that has been cooked outside, and it was great to cook with such a nice group of people! Coming from New Zealand, it was pretty magic to be able to sit outside, under a kiwifruit vine, drinking local Retsina and eating our pizza!

Jessica Zanetti
New Zealand