Blackout Pizza

So what do you do when the electricity goes out and you have about 2 kilso of pizza dough and all the cheese and toppings ready?

Well last night in Terenure at around 8pm as our Italian student was heating the oven to cook his lovingly prepared pizzas (they took all afternoon), we looked out at the pouring rain and thought we were glad to be indoors about to be fed our dinner. His host family and two friends from his english course were sitting waiting in anticipation (the dough seemed to take forever to rise). The wine was open and hunger was beginning to bite, and then the lights went out.

A quick look on the street made it clear that every house in the area had no lights either.

Unlike the other houses on our road however I have a clay and straw built oven in the back garden. built a couple of years ago by a French builder friend. It is really more of a bread oven than a pizza oven but it can do pizzas in small batches. It also can be heated with about 3 logs chopped into small pieces so it is very inexpensive to run (far cheaper than cooking pizza in a conventional oven).

The outside is covered in lime plastering to protect from the rain but given it is made from all natural materials I usually keep it covered. You see in the pics that I had an umbrella over it and a piece of polystyrene to deflect the rain that was pouring down in torrents from our damaged gutter. It is never fun cooking outside in the pouring rain but it is made much worse by the constant splashing of water from a leaky gutter!

Anyway I had to begin cooking as soon as it got any heat or we would have all starved with the hunger so there were a few charred edges but all in all it worked well. Everyone was fed and I just sat down to eat my own pizza, enjoying my triumph over adversity and the romantic atmosphere created by the candles, when the lights came back on!

I used the extra heat and the remaining pizza dough to cook some foccacia as the oven cooled and I am munching a piece as I write this.