The homemade pizza revolution has started and it promises to be peaceful, fun and amazingly delicious! Now, anyone can convert their standard gas grill into the ultimate pizza oven for a fraction of the cost of a professional brick oven, thanks to the Mighty Pizza Oven that has just been launched on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter. The result is crunchy, golden brown restaurant-quality pizzas baked at home in just 3-5 minutes.
“Why is it almost impossible to bake professional-quality pizza in a regular home oven?” asks Bert Touma, engineer, homemade pizza enthusiast and designer of the Mighty Pizza Oven. “The answer is that home ovens are just not hot enough for the job, so you have to leave your pizza baking longer and this dries it up. Besides, home ovens are bad at balancing the top and bottom heat, which means you often end up with either a burned crust or undercooked toppings. By baking the pizza quickly in just 3-5 minutes of intense heat, the Mighty Pizza Oven is able to crisp the outside of the pizza dough and ingredients while preserving all the tasty, juicy goodness inside, which is exactly what happens in the ovens restaurants use.”
The stainless steel Mighty Pizza Oven fits on top of most standard gas grills and uses the grill’s intense heat to reproduce the very high temperatures and ideal baking conditions you get inside expensive professional brick ovens.
“I believe anyone can learn to make homemade pizzas that are every bit as awesome as the best pizzeria pies out there,” Bert explains. “The techniques involved in making great pizza are really quite simple for anyone to master and we have plenty of information up on our Pizza 101 blog to get people started. The one thing missing is a proper pizza oven. I’ve been baking pizza at home for years as a hobby but I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a bulky brick oven and I wasn’t sold on the alternatives. With a growing family and limited time for my hobby, I wanted to make my homemade pizza experience easier, more convenient and faster, so I needed a pizza oven that heated up quickly and was very easy to use. Then, one day I was watching a chef grill my burger under a basting cover and the idea for the Mighty Pizza Oven sprang into my head: I would use my grill as a powerful heat source and design a compact and easy-to-use pizza oven to go on top.”
How the Mighty Pizza Oven works
The pizza to be baked sits inside the Mighty Pizza Oven between two pizza stones made of materials that have excellent heat transfer properties and that can withstand rapid changes in temperature without cracking.
The bottom pizza stone is in direct contact with the grill’s flame and acts like a brick oven’s floor, storing heat and transferring it evenly and efficiently to the base of the pizza. This bottom stone is designed to be slightly smaller than the Mighty Pizza Oven, allowing an intense amount of heat from the grill to reach the top pizza stone, which reflects it back onto the top of the pizza just like a brick oven’s interior does. All that heat melts the cheese in seconds, cooks the topping ingredients quickly, and gives the pizza a lovely golden-brown color. The Mighty Pizza Oven also has an adjustable vent system that works like a brick oven’s chimney, drawing in humid outside air and circulating it over the pizza to make sure it doesn’t dry out.
The Mighty Pizza Oven warms up quickly on a gas grill and soon reaches the ideal baking temperature, making it very fuel efficient. It is also lightweight, compact and easy to set up and use, and can also be used on a large variety of heat sources.
Delicious homemade pizza for all
“I designed the Mighty Pizza Oven to be as easy to set up and use as grilling a plain old burger,” explains Bert Touma. “Now, my dream is to bring restaurant-quality homemade pizza within everyone’s reach and I am counting on the generous Kickstarter community and on pizza lovers around the world to help make that happen.”
The Mighty Pizza Oven is the result of a whole year’s worth of prototyping and testing. After a very encouraging response from local pizza enthusiasts, Bert Touma decided to produce the first batch of 90 ovens in advance. They are already on hand and waiting to be delivered to the fastest Kickstarter backers as soon as the project is funded. The Mighty Pizza Oven will cost $259 for orders placed via Kickstarter, including free shipping in the 48 Continental United States — a substantial discount on the eventual retail price of $349 + shipping.
Bert Touma already has big ideas to take the Mighty Pizza Oven to the next level once the Kickstarter drive is successful. He hopes to receive enough funding and support from the community to be able to design a number of optional lightweight burner bases to power the Mighty Pizza Oven using gas, charcoal/wood, or even chafing fuel. Any of these burners would make the Mighty Pizza Oven setup 100% portable, so it could be easily taken along on camping trips and tailgating. Bert also has plans for additional accessories, including a Mighty Pizza Oven cookbook, and is committed to work hard to make the homemade pizza experience the very best it could possibly be.
“My vision is that the Mighty Pizza Oven will one day become a familiar part of every household,” he explains enthusiastically. “I see it being a treasured and durable kitchen tool, almost like that special cast iron pot or frying pan you pass down from generation to generation. I see the Mighty Pizza Oven doing for homemade pizza what the electric toaster did for sliced bread. This is the start of the Homemade Pizza Revolution, where delicious, healthy, homemade pizza is easily within everyone’s reach.”
As an added bonus, this oven is capable of cooking much more than pizza. For example, you can grill vegetables or meat using a griddle instead of the bottom stone. This is an exciting new angle that I’m just starting to explore with great results so far, and I’m very excited to see how everybody else will be using their Mighty Pizza Ovens.”
The Mighty Pizza Oven can be pre-ordered from the project’s Kickstarter page at http://goo.gl/1MBS9 The fastest backers will be able to reserve one of the first batch of 90 Mighty Pizza Ovens that is already on hand and ready to be delivered as soon as the project is funded. More information is available on the Kickstarter page and at http://MightyPizzaOven.com, where promising pizza chefs will find the Pizza 101 Blog, packed with all the tips tricks and recipes they need to perfect their pizza-making skills.
For more details, kindly contact:
Bert Touma
info@mightypizzaoven.com
Tel.: (832)303-2859
