Each week we strive to make delicious food in our wood fired oven, but what does that Mary Chapin Carpenter song say? “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” You start out with the best intentions, beautiful fresh toppings, and homemade dough. Some nights the results are incredible and others…well, let’s just say they are not pretty. The incidence of pizza disasters is less than it was early on, but it still happens…even in the Fanatic household.
Sometimes you think you’ve done everything right and you end up with this…ZERO bloom, flat crust, no bubble.
Other times you try to make a romantic, heart-shaped pie for your Valentine and end up with over inflated crust on a heart-like pizza.
Maybe (particularly when you are new to pizza making) you get overzealous with the quantity of toppings or the amount of shake required to launch the pizza into the oven and up with a hole (or holes!!). This will make a temporary mess of your oven floor but often still results in a tasty pizza if all your toppings didn’t get lost in the shuffle.
Don’t give up!! Things get better, the mistakes are fewer but things will always go wrong from time to time. For example, we recently tried to make the braised short ribs from the Mugnaini website. We struggled to control the temperature at times. Things went pretty well to start and then suddenly ALL the liquid was gone and the ribs looked shriveled and dry.
What a bummer after all the time we put in to making them. However, they were still tasty! Even our mini-Fanatic liked them (and she doesn’t like anything!!)
The moral of the story goes back to the beginning of this post…we can’t let the fear of failure keep us from trying new things in our ovens. I promise if you continue to cook new things or repeat the dishes that didn’t quite pan out, you will be the windshield much more often than the bug!
Angela Barnes wants to educate fellow wood fired fanatics on cooking and technical aspects of wood fired ovens. 
