Stephen's pizza oven

My friend Stephen invited me to his house on Saturday to eat pizza from his new pizza oven. We've been reading and drooling over "The Bread Builders" that I bought from Amazon a little while ago, and Stephen finally decided to just buy a pizza oven. I, on the other hand, am still mulling over the possibility of building a stone bread oven, and trying to think of somewhere at my place I could fit one.

Here is Stephen's newly installed pizza oven, in the process of heating up:


They actually produce very little smoke, and I'm really thinking I'd be happy with a very rustic, non-chimneyed stone one. Much easier to build without a chimney too.

Here I stuck the camera into the oven door and snapped in the general direction of a baking pizza:


And here is the pizza being chopped up:


Stephen and his wife have four kids, and the other guests have two teenagers, so I was lucky to be able to get a picture of a pizza before it disappeared into their bottomless stomachs.

This was my contribution to the feast (baked in my ordinary old electric oven):


And this was the contribution of the other guests:


Good old New Zealand classic Pavlova. That's a bought one, made by Cowells. Somehow or other they have developed a process by which they can make Pavlovas that are stable for quite some time. You just buy one and take it home and add cream and fruit to taste. They are very marshmallowy inside, but don't have quite enough of the outside crunchy bit. A perfect Pavlova has just enough crunch that you can hear yourself eating it, but you can't hear the person next to you eating theirs.