The Magic of Homemade Pizza

I don't know what people ate before the Italians invented and spread all over the world this delicious and easy meal: the pizza. It might have been substantial and tasty food, but unconsciously our ancestors must have missed the well known combination of bread dough, tomato sauce and mozzarella, topping it up with your favorite meat or vegetable ingredients. The best thing about this dish is its variability: once you've mastered the skills of putting the right amount of flour and water to yeast and letting it rest for the exact amount of time, your options to making a pizza are virtually unlimited. Just choose two or three of the ingredients you want to use and craving for, put it on the dough and shove it in the oven. After approximately 10 minutes the appetizing smell emerging from the oven will give you the hint: your pizza is ready to be devoured.

Combining the unvarnished and savory art of pizza making with the social event of an open space barbecue results in the more and more popular backyard pizza baking. As a deduction, its positive aspects are unambiguous, but as a real practice it could provide some difficulties regarding the baking process. First of all, don't try to cook a pizza on the open flame grill bars: it will be full of smoke, dry and burned. Also, try to avoid the irresistible temptation to make a handmade upgrade to your normal barbecue so it will look more like a backyard pizza oven. If you really want to bake your pizzas in the open air, and are sure you will use it enough to clear your costs, get yourself a brand new wood-fired pizza oven. Depending on how handy you are and how much experience you have in matters like this, you can either build your own backyard pizza oven, have a professional do it for you, or in between: buy it ready made in a store and mount it yourself. Why you should choose from the latter two options if you're not an architect or something with a less fancy name but the same effect: building an oven requires a lot of tools you might not have, ingredients like cement, bricks, stones, pipes which nowadays come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and brands and types, which can be confusing and most importantly: because it involves fire and as such, it's extremely dangerous.

But if you do decide to procure yourself a backyard pizza oven, you are in for a treat: it not only can bake you pizzas, but also other delicious pastry like home made bread, croissants and all kinds of pies. So if you have the space, the money and the need for a backyard pizza oven, go get it!