Travelling 1000 Miles To Cook A Pizza With Portable Pizza Oven - Europe Road Trip Ep 3

Myself and my good mate Jim had just spent the last four days travelling 1,000 miles all the way to Italy to cook a pizza in my new portable pizza oven and finally the day had come to make up some dough and put this beautiful bit of kit to the test in the country where pizza first came from. We had travelled through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and now we were driving over the Alps and finally entering Italy. Are these the most crazy roads you've ever driven on? Yeah. No way, we've nearly made it. There, Italia. Italy feels so much different you know, the air, the air and the ambiance. Do they drive on the left here? No. We arrived in Italy. We made it to Italy and now we have to make some pizza dough. I've got a bowl and scales, 500 grams of flour, seven and a half grams of salt. One second while I get this in the oven. 300 grams of water, that'll do and also we've got the sourdough starter which we prepared yesterday. 125 grams of starter. Now I'm just going to mix it all up. I'm going to knead the bread. Within a ball of dough there is lots of gluten. Now gluten is within the flour and it's very important for bread and pizza making because it's what makes the bread stretchy and elasticy and you need it to be stretchy so when you put it in the oven it rises without breaking. Ball of dough in the bowl. Now we can let this rise for a few hours. When you let dough rise you're basically allowing the yeast to eat away at the sugars inside the flour and then lots of CO2 is created and it builds the dough up and makes it rise into a nice loaf of bread or in this case some nice crusty pizza bases. Now interestingly with dough making there isn't an exact amount of time you can just leave this for. It all depends on the temperature because yeast works at different rates in different temperatures so if it's really cold it might take this 12 hours to rise but if it's really warm it might take only a couple of hours. Here it's like 30 degrees so hopefully, not exactly sure but it shouldn't take more than a few hours for this to rise and fill the bowl but we shall wait and see. I never thought I'd see the day where I'm making pizza dough in the back of a van. Life is unexpected. You just never know what's around the corner. We've got the van parked up at this incredible place. Look at it Alan and we're gonna try and find a way down and cook pizzas by the water. Should be fun. Yeah buddy. Oh yes Jim. Wow. Done. Jim's doing some climbing. Go on Jim. That looked epic. Hey Jim it's an olive tree. I think. Look at that. The pizza oven is lit and the dough is bulging and the charcoal is already going pretty well and then the chimney has a little vent on it here which means if I close it there it stops the airflow and I can open it like that. Infrared thermometer. Currently it's saying 190 degrees but we want it to be more like 400 or 300 400 500 that sort of thing. Oh wow 320 degrees. That's how you stretch pizza dough. Now it's getting a bit wonky. Tomato. We had to come to the Italian mountains by a beautiful lake to try out the pizza oven for the first time and I'm happy we did it because it's been fun. Pizza. Was it worth it coming all the way to Italy to eat a pizza? Yes it was because I'll remember today for the rest of my life the day me and my mate Jim drove 1000 miles all the way to Italy to try out my new pizza oven to eat pizza on the shores of this big old beautiful lake next to the mountains. I guess now we have to make it all the way back to England which is another thousand miles so bring on the long drive home. Looking back at this day cooking pizzas in Italy I'm a little bit disappointed in myself. The pizzas were okay they were edible but they were so far from perfect. The cheese was drying out in the sun, the tomato sauce was weak and not very salty, the crusts on the pizzas didn't char like I wanted them to. I've got a lot to learn when it comes to pizza so I just wanted to let you know that this isn't the end of my pizza journey there is more to this. I'm going to fire up my oven again probably do it at home where I've got some time I've got space to prepare everything properly and create a lot better pizzas so stay tuned for that. Cheers for watching the video I'll see you next time on the Just Alex channel.