I have been working on this Winter pizza recipe for some time and think I have it perfected. December is hardly the time for a lot of fresh vegetables on pizza, but kale is available almost year round in my area. This pizza incorporates the creamy, sweetness of Cambozola cheese with the bite of red onion and the crisp texture and earthy taste of kale chips. 

Pre-heat oven and baking stone to 500°F or higher. 

For this pizza, I use a pizza dough with 10% whole wheat flour, but this is optional. 

Start with 4 cups of either kale or loosely packed winter greens including varieties of kale, chard and tatsoi or mustard greens. My favorite is Lacinato kale but Redbor looks stunning on the pizza

Toss the greens with 2 Tbs olive oil, 1/4 tsp salt and 1/4 of a red onion thinly sliced as shown below. 

Stretch 250 grams of pizza dough to a diameter of 10-12 inches. 

Top first with about 3-4 oz of Cambozola cheese slices then all the greens and onion. Bake for approximately 8-9 minutes at 500°F. The kale will become crispy like kale chips with the creamy Cambozola underneath. 

This is the first in a series of small pizza oven reviews. 

About a year ago, Kristian Tapaninaho created a Kickstarter project for his ultra-small wood fired pizza oven idea. The concept was brilliant: combine a small metal oven with a gravity fed wood pellet hopper and a battery powered fan. The response to his crowdsource funding was overwhelming. In two weeks he was fully funded and ready to begin production in the summer of 2013. The result is a high temperature pizza oven that heats up in about 10 minutes and can make great pizzas. 

The Uuni, which means 'oven" in Tapaninaho's native Finnish, arrives in a surprisingly small box. 

Assembly is easy with only a phillips head screwdriver and perhaps a pair of pliers required. The oven consists of several components. The oven chamber itself is about 48 x 36 x 12 cm or 17 x 13 x 5 inches. At the back of the oven is a combustion chamber, wood pellet hopper, air regulator and battery powered fan. 

After assembly, the lighting of the oven is not obvious from the instructions, but fortunately, Kristian offers a youtube video on this topic. 

Once the fire is going, the pellet hopper can be filled. Be sure the fire is going strong or the added pellets can put out the fire. After about 10 minutes, the oven is hot enough to bake. (500-700 °F) I was astounded not only at the speed this oven came to temperature but at how little fuel it required. 

The pizza I made went in for about a minute before it was ready to turn. Another minute and I checked and turned it again. 45 seconds later it was ready to eat. Great crust, nice char, creamy soft crumb and some smoky taste. A little ash was visible in the cheese but not excessive. I think a longer heat up time would have given a crisper bottom crust, but it was acceptable. 

The workflow for baking should remain the same. 
1) Make your pizza 2) add pellets if needed 3) tap the chute to be sure the pellets are not stuck 4) put your pizza in the oven.

The one time I did not follow this workflow, the pellets got stuck and the pizza took much longer to cook and was excessively smoky tasting and ashy.   I never found the bottom to be as well cooked as this photo from the manufacturer.  

This kind of oven, like the rocket oven I made a while ago, tends to heat and cool quickly so monitoring the fuel becomes a high priority as there is little stored heat in the oven. At the end of this review I link to some propane fueled ovens that may provide greater ease of use but will not, of course, offer any wood fired smoke taste to your pizzas. 

What are the best features of this oven? First the size is adorable. This little oven would be perfect on an apartment balcony, a tailgate party, or a barbecue. The combustion chamber detaches and fits inside the oven and the whole thing would easily fit in the trunk of a car to bring to a party.

The speed of this oven is also noteworthy. As mentioned, it will reach 500-700 °F in 10-15 minutes. The economy of fuel use is also revelutionary. I baked two pizzas and ran the oven for about 20 minutes using about 2 cups of wood pellets. This is less than the kindling I might use to start my masonry oven. The quality of the bake is very good. It is not exactly the same as baking in a 900 °F Neapolitan pizza oven, but it is better than most home ovens. Finally, the cost of this oven, at just over $300 is thousands less than one might pay for a masonry oven.

Are there any downsides?  Yes, a few.  The included pizza peel, for example, is functional but hardly satisfying.  I would much prefer a sturdier peel (or this one you can cut on) to the sheet of aluminum they include with the oven.  

Some parts of the oven seem a little flimsy but given the low price, this may be inevitable.  The bracket holding the door handle especially seemed to flex more than necessary.  I haven't decided if the handles are chic and minimalist or look like they came from someone's garage wood shop.  Perhaps a little more refinement in the handles such as nicer wood and little sanding could be achieved at minimal additional production cost.  While the battery pack has a little shelf to sit upon, the whole battery contraption seems more like a prototype than a refined product,   

Finally, I found maintaining constant and consistent heat to require more effort than I expected.  I could not get a crisp bottom on the pizzas I cooked.  This is not a propane fueled oven that you can set and forget.  Links to some of those ovens are at the end of this review.   

So who is this oven designed for? The ideal user would be someone looking for an outdoor pizza oven who appreciates the results of high temperature wood heat but does not have the space , time or budget for a masonry oven. They have already added a good thick stone to their home oven but want more yet do not have space or budget for a large masonry oven. Comparing this little oven to a masonry oven is comparing apples to oranges. While both can cook pizza, a large masonry oven allows the cook to watch the food baking, stores heat for baking bread and is large enough to roast all kinds of foods. The large oven also uses a lot of wood and takes hours to heat up. This little oven bakes pizza and thats about all it does, but it does it efficiently. 

The Uuni is available at these locations for about $325. For even more ease of use, there are propane fueled alternatives to this oven such as the Pizzeria Pronto , The Kettle Pizza Grill or The Blackstone Outdoor Oven with rotating pizza stone. I have not tested these ovens but want to suggest potential alternatives for those shopping for this size oven. 

Have you ever wanted to do something really right; the way it should be done?  Like making sourdough bread over the course of several days or building a wood fired oven?  Adam Dick and Dustin Taylor have brought that thinking to the craft of making chocolate.  In spades.

As fine woodworkers, they know that hand crafted trumps machine produced and they bring that artisan heedfulness  to the chocolate they make starting by hand selecting the cacao beans they roast themselves.  Roasting takes place in a Royal #5 coffee roaster that they lovingly refurbished.

"Patience and care must be taken to fit all joints water tight.  It is not a fast process.  We feel like much of the patience required to build a boat carries over to the chocolate making process.  We don't rush the process, often repeating steps if they are not done right the first time, scrapping an entire batch if we are not proud of the product."

Using only two ingredients (cacao and sugar) these men coax the flavor out of every bean into the most exquisite bar of chocolate you may have ever tasted.   

Other chocolatiers add emulsifiers, cocoa butter or vanilla to enhance their chocolate but Adam and Dustin see those ingredients as covering up the true flavor of the chocolate.  The entire process of roasting, grinding, aging, molding and tempering can take a month to complete, but the result has all the nuance of a fine bottle of red wine.  They have as much similarity to a Hershey's bar as a wood fired Neapolitan pizza does to a frozen supermarket pizza. 

Every aspect of their process is old-school and thoughtful.  Even the labels are original artwork of the lumber schooner C.A. Thayer which traveled from Humboldt Bay to San Francisco.

Why illustrate the art of a ship building on a bar of chocolate?   "We chose our [this] illustration to highlight a craft that is near and dear to us, the craft of a Shipwright.  In our minds the pinnacle of wood-craft is boat building.  The complex, and constantly changing curves of a boat hull represent the greatest challenge to the woodworker.  

At the current time, there are six chocolates available 
(my tasting notes- your impression will certainly be different):

• 72% Madagascar: Citrus and berry notes.
• 72% Belize: Floral with dried fruit.  A 2013 Good Food Awards Finalist and Northwest Chocolate Fest Bronze award winner.
• 76% Equador: mildly acidic, robust chocolate flavor with mild floral notes and earthy cherry
• 74% Dominican Republic: strong, acidic and assertive.  A bold bar with citrus notes. My personal favorite.
• 70% Equador with Black Fig: a lovely combination that brings out the sweet, leathery tobacco notes of both the chocolate and the fruit.
• 74% Dominican with a sprinkle of Fleur de Sel:  Takes a little getting used to, but once you have developed the taste for salted chocolate, nothing else compares.
  

Until I tried Dick Taylor chocolate, I had no idea of the subtle complexity that chocolate could possess.  Some may be surprised at the slightly higher price of this kind of fine chocolate.  But this is a chocolate to savor and relish on the tongue not to gobble thoughtlessly.  One of my favorite desserts is a glass of port, an ounce or so of Dick Taylor chocolate and some fresh fruit.  Doesn't get much better than that.  As Michael Levine said, "Chocolate really is the perfect food."

I celebrate those of us who are returning to a slower, more thoughtful way of crafting the things we enjoy.   Keep up the good work, Adam and Dustin.  If you are in Arcata on a Monday when the tasting room is open, be sure to drop in.  Also available online and in many stores.  

Dick Taylor Craft Chocolate | 5301 Boyd Rd. Arcata, CA 95521 | (707)843-9255 | craftchocolate@gmail.com

Photos used by permission.