Sculpin

Last Saturday, Josh and I were running a little late. We needed to buy eggs, and those always sell out at the farmers market in a snap, so we were in too much of a hurry to stop for breakfast first. Which seemed like a fine excuse for stopping afterward by the Rolling Fire stand for some wonderful wood-fired pizza.

If you’ve been to the U District Farmers Market, you might still have missed it. It’s tucked away in a courtyard close to the old schoolhouse. Mike Dash, the owner, has a big wood-fired oven on a trailer that he pulls with a biodiesel-powered truck. The pizza he and his assistant make there is the kind I remember having in Italy: a thin, delicate crust with a hint of crackle, topped delicately with highly flavored ingredients. Plus there’s a hint of charred fruity sweetness to it — I can only guess that’s flavor from the apple wood he uses and from the bits of char on the pizza itself. It’s delicious and highly satisfying.

It’s also fascinating to watch him use that oven. Things cook amazingly quickly. A pizza might take three minutes. And, I have to admit, Mike interests me too — he seems so gentle and grounded. It makes me wonder how somebody comes to be that way. He reminds me of Vince from Pies and Pints a little bit. I’m coming to think that making good things with your own hands is good for the soul. His manner is so sweet that it coaxes my shyness-to-inquisitiveness ratio all the way over into full-force inquisitiveness, and by Saturday I was asking him all kinds of questions about the oven and the pizza-making process.

As it happened, he was teaching a woodfired oven class at the Experimental College the very next day. “Extreme Cuisine”, the class was called. So Josh and I signed up for the last two spaces and went down to his houseboat to make pizza of our own. (Josh took a few photos.) Consider: houseboat; woodfired oven. You know, those weigh about a ton. Getting it onto the boat must have been quite a trick; and once on, he said, the whole platform tipped about fourteen inches, and he had to get divers to put extra flotation on that side. It’s a beautiful little oven with a fold-down metal shelf in front and a cheerful salamander tile over the entrance. (I say “little” because it’s much smaller than that cob monster we helped build at the UW.) He says it takes about an hour for it to come up to full heat.

There were six of us students, and after a little prep work and some tasty pre-pizza snacks, we each made two pizzas. The dough he uses is very loose, and it takes a little coaxing to get it out of the box it’s been rising in. We tapped the bubbles out with the flats of our fingers and pulled it out to an eleven-inch mostly-round. (Josh still has his mad Pagliacci skills, but I definitely do not yet have the touch when it comes to pulling it out into a crust. Then again, Mike says that it took him forever to learn to make a round crust. He’d have his friends over and announce, “This is a map of Madagascar!” as he pulled the pizzas out of the oven.) Then we’d put it on a thin floured board, top it with a few things — slices of roasted potato and slivers of roasted pepper with garlic in olive oil was a good combination — and slide it into the oven.

In under a minute it’d start to speckle on the side closest to the fire, which was our cue to check the bottom and turn it. Turning it’s a bit of a trick. The first time I wound up just pulling the whole thing out, turning it, and putting it back in. Inelegant, but it works. The second time, I managed to turn it in a more classic style. You slide the small, long-handled metal peel just under the pizza, twist it so that the pizza catches on its edge, pull back slightly, and repeat. Sometimes the middle of the pizza doesn’t cook quite as fast as you’d like, especially if you’ve put a fair bit of stuff on; in that case, you get the peel well under the pizza and lift it up near the roof of the oven for a few seconds for a little extra top heat.

It was delicious. Nobody made a pizza that was anything less than very good, and some of them were great. I was surprised to find that I liked the dessert pizza a lot: halved red grapes, cut side down, sprinkled with sugar. It reminded me a little bit of a sopapilla minus the deep-frying. Mike says that one traditional dessert pizza involves a layer of plum jam, which sounds interesting. (And imagine roasting plums in some gentle residual heat after a day of cooking pizza… hm!)

I hear they’re firing up that monster cob oven on Thursdays, and now I feel prepared to come over and help. And Mike’s class has showed me that yes, I really do want one of my own. Those things are fun, and they’re so heavily insulated that they take less wood than you might think. Until then, though, I think I might try cooking a few things in our soapstone fireplace insert. Mike turned me onto a beautiful book, The Magic of Fire, which is all about cooking on the hearth and in the firebox. I don’t really have a hearth, but I think I’ll be able to adapt a lot of the book’s ideas.

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