Combining the cooked dried pasta with the cooked fresh pasta worked out fine, as I used that with the new marinara sauce that I had made. The only complaint I had about the marinara sauce (other than being a bit too spicy) was that it needed a bit more salt. Kevin didn't notice, but I added some Himalayan salt to my plate, but I had to grind it and ended up adding a bit too much. It's hard for me to tell how much salt is coming out of the salt grinder, since I seldom use it. Anyway, I added about half a teaspoon of salt to the leftover marinara sauce and put it back into the fridge for later use.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to make a pizza for dinner because I had some fresh mozzarella that I wanted to use up, and I also decided to use my Ooni pizza dough recipe and make one 16" pizza instead of two 11" pizzas. I also wanted to cook the pizza directly on the stone instead of using a pizza screen, which is what I usually do. I don't remember when I cooked directly on the stone instead of using a screen, but I know that I have some 15" to 16" screens.

My Ooni dough recipe has a higher hydration than my regular pizza dough recipe, and I was able to stretch the dough out on my countertop to more than 16", but it looked right and was the thickness that I wanted, which was fairly thin, with a thicker edge. However, it ended up being larger than my wooden peel, and so I tried to shrink it a bit on the peel before adding the toppings.

I always use semolina flour on the peel (I don't want my pizza to taste like a corn tortilla and always avoid cornmeal with pizza), but the semolina flour I have in L.A. is from Bob Red Mill, and the package states that it is for making pasta. Therefore, it is extremely fine, unlike the semolina I get from the Lebanese/Syrian market, which is rather coarse - they sell different grades of semolina, and I buy the coarse. This was not really an issue, but I had to use a lot more semolina than I expected in order to make sure that the pizza would slide.

I asked Kevin what he wanted on the pizza (since we do not have much fresh basil on our old basil plant in the back yard), and he said that he wanted some marinated artichoke hearts, which he said we had in the refrigerator in the garage. I told him to get them, and he noticed that the date on the jar was 2016, but I opened the jar, and they seemed fine, although a bit flavorless. They were from Trader Joe's and were packed in oil and had been stored in the fridge for the past seven years.

I chopped a few of the artichoke hearts anyway and had Kevin put them on the pizza after I had put the marinara sauce on. I had to purée some of the sauce before using it on the pizza because it was too chunky. I added about 5 oz of the fresh mozzarella on the pizza (because it was so large) after Kevin finished, and then I had him open the oven door so that I could launch the pizza. I had moved the pizza stone to the top shelf (which is on rollers), and we slid the shelf out to make it easier to access. I had preheated the oven to about 550°, but the stone registered 575° on our thermometer gun.

When launching the 16" diameter pizza, I found out that the pizza stone is only 14" deep, and therefore the pizza did not fit. I tried to push the pizza after it was already on the stone, but I had to sort of fold a bit of the leading edge in order to get it completely on the stone. The stone is about 16½" wide, and so that was not a problem, but the depth was.

The pizza got done in 9 minutes, and then I used my large aluminum peel to remove it. It came out very crunchy on the bottom and edges, which we both liked very much. Even the leading edge that I had scrunched up a bit came out nice, and basically, this pizza was much better than the ones I had been cooking on the screens, although I've had good success with the screens when cooking on the Big Green Egg.

The other problem with last night's pizza was that I got a lot of semolina flour on the oven door and on the floor of the oven, and so I will have to clean that out. I do think, however, that the large amount of semolina that ended up on the bottom of the pizza did help make the crust crunchier and have a better texture.

Well, that was an amusing tale, Lars, but not so oops except the scorch, since the pizza was good even scrunched. :) And the bit of char flavor kicked over into desireable. ;) The stone, IME, aborbs moisture when the pizza is in direct contact. Mine gives the crust crispness on the bottom, but leaves the interior tender. It sounds like the semolina absorbed more moisture and enhanced the crisp. I think screens are awesome over heated air, but on top of the stone, I find a thin, solid pizza pan works best. You’ve definitely put me in the mood to make pizza! Thanks for the story!

Lars, It sounds like you had quite the cooking adventures. 😄

TJ's artichokes after 7 years?! I can imagine they didn't taste like much.

The first boo boo was ordering the 105 oz cans of tomatoes, but of course that happened last year, and I am dealing with it. It would be less of an issue if I had more freezer storage space.

My main takeaway from this experience is not to make marinara sauce in the PC - I will make sure in the future to use a pan with an easily removable lid so that I can stir it fairly frequently. Normally, I do stir things a lot, and so this is unusual for me.

I have revised the pizza dough recipe I used to 80% for all of the ingredients, and this was very easy to do, since this recipe uses all metric measurements, and I weigh all of the ingredients. I think this reduction should be good for making a 14" diameter pizza, which would fit on my stone.

I get really consistent results when I weigh ingredients, and I use two scales - one is a jeweler's scale, which I use for weighing small amounts, which includes the salt, yeast, and olive oil.

I'm pretty sure I remember when you got the tomatoes. ;) I did that once with a single can of simething, but the the contents had separated and there was a metallic tinged, so I chucked the whole thing and chalked it up to experience. I liked your topped with oil and vacuumed before chilling, to keep the rest from oxidizing. I'm not so clever on those things. Agreed on the scales! I can do rough measures by volume, or even just feel, on baking recipes I know well, but, for a new recipe, I'll often convert to weight as I'm doing the volume measures, so making tweaks and corrections is easier.

I had a bag of what I thought were overripe peeled bananas in the freezer and decided to make banana bread. So I defrosted the bananas and when I opened the bag and looked more closely at the contents, I discovered they were in fact peeled figs :-/ I wasn't game to experiment with fig bread as it was intended for work, and tasting the figs I found they were sweet, but pretty tasteless otherwise, so I just tossed them. They were from a friend's tree.

So now I have a batch of chocolate chip cookies :-)

I often try to convert F to C for outdoor weather temps, but I never think of it for cooking temps.

When I bake pizzas in our Ooni oven in Cathedral City, we get the stone to 935°F/500°C, and the pizza cooks in about one and a half minutes. I wish we were all on metric, which I find much easier to use and revise, but almost all of my measuring tools are Imperial. I wish we had never inherited this system from England.

Colleen, I never peel bananas before freezing them. I find that they keep much better in the freezer with the peels on, and they are easy to peel when frozen. I just submerge them in hot water for a couple of minutes, and then the peels come off very easily.

Lars, I don’t usually peel them, but the plan was to make fruit ”icecream” in one of those machines that grinds up slightly defrosted frozen fruit and it comes out similar to soft serve icecream.

My SIL has an Ooni. I think I prefer my Ariete as I can use it indoors, all year round. We don't have your lovely climate! whereas he has to keep his in the garden. Yes, imperial measurements are a pain. I was always very jealous of European kids when I was at school. It's funny that the U.S. has kept the imperial system. The Brits fumble about with both, usually using what suits for the job. Beer comes in pints, carrots in KG. Last time I bought fabric, it was in both with 2 different prices!

LOL on the different prices! Here fabric is actually called ”yardage”! Though, I'm most fond of the place where they measure ”yards” and give you meters. Like in the old days when they'd goose a bargain in pounds by settling on the same number in guineas. ;) We don't actually have ”imperial” in that things like pints are different here from in England. It's Canada that has it really bad, trying to be metric, but stuck with all three! I like our system. It's fun, and poetic. I was sad when British money went decimal. No more guineas, though they were still using a lot of the old coins much later, when I visited, and one had to memorize the conversion of shillings to new pence. But, then, I had a superior first grade teacher who pushed learning measures in creative ways, and I don't know how I'd feel without that background. I use metric for baking, because the calibration on my scale is more accurate in grams, even though grams are supposed to be mass, not weight. :)

My understanding is that ml is volume and gram is weight. One ml of water weighs one gram.

In chemistry and physics, mass and weight are the same thing, except that weight takes gravity into account whereas mass does not. "Volume" is used to measure size, regardless of density or gravity.

Exactly. Grans is actually a measure of mass, which is not the same as weight, as you noted, but is approximated to use on a scale as weight.