A year ago I purchased an Ooni Koda pizza gas oven. Since then I have been baking pizzas with it almost on a weekly basis. I am really happy with it because it takes baked (Neapolitan-style) pizzas on a completely new level compared to a traditional home ovens, with or without baking stone.

In this post I would like to share my current process of making pizza dough and baking process in Ooni Koda.

1. For making the dough, I use mix of 00 , all-purpose and wholegrain flour. Each pizza ball is around 220 g, 60 % hydration. Here the most important thing is to knead the dough so it stretches easily and is able to trap air bubbles during fermentation. For that I use hand mixer with dough hook attachments.
2. For storing the balls I use plastic container which can hold two of them.
3. I never bake pizzas on the same day when I make the dough. After few hours on a kitchen counter I put container in the fridge (if I have more of them, I stack them on top of each other) and bake the next day or the day after.
4. Before making pizza, I take care that dough and toppings are at room temperature, especially the dough. That means taking containers out of the fridge for at least 3 hours (4 is best). If baking when still cold, there is a high chance the final pizza/cheese will come out of the pizza oven burnt.

After a year and following mentioned process of making pizza, I became accustomed to baking them at full flame in Ooni Koda pizza (center of the baking stone is almost at 500 degrees Celsius) and they do not come out of the oven (at least badly) burnt. I can confirm that they taste even better compared to baking them at lower flame.

I am currently working on using perforated pizza peel for transferring pizzas into the oven because I would like to get rid of burnt bottoms because of excess flour left there from shaping the dough and the fact I now use wooden pizza peel for launching pizzas into the oven.