Below is a photo of Mario Batali's wood-fired oven that was imported from Italy and installed outside of his home in Michigan. The photo appeared in an article about Mario in today's (8/17/07) online New York Times. No details as to the manufacturer of the oven were given.
The parts of the article that discuss his oven and its use are as follows:
WATCHING Mario Batali shovel a pizza topped with chopped tomatoes, wet chunks of fresh mozzarella and grilled artichokes into his crackling outdoor pizza oven, it is easy to imagine you are in a hill town outside Bologna, perhaps even in Borgo Capanne, where Mr. Batali apprenticed for three years at a trattoria. The surrounding spruce trees and the wind off the lake only add to the air of authenticity, as does the wood smoke that plumes out from the top of the brick oven and the smell of baking bread…
Mr. Batali’s outdoor pizza oven was installed their second summer in the house (it was shipped from Italy) and soon after, an outdoor kitchen was added, complete with a Big Green Egg, a large oval ceramic smoker in which Mr. Batali makes, among other dishes, paella. “Since I can’t cook it over a fire of vine clippings like they do in Spain, I bought this,” he said.
Yet the pizza oven is the main food focus of Mr. Batali’s Michigan life. “I will make 30 pizzas in one night if we have friends over,” he said, stretching and throwing dough into a second pizza with green olives and three peppers — one Peppadew and two guindillas. Though the children prefer plain pizzas, they once made one with barbecued sparerib meat, and Michael Moore, who was in town recently for the Traverse City Film Festival, came over for a sausage pizza.
At Thanksgiving Mr. Batali slipped a 20-pound stuffed turkey into the pizza oven, along with sweet potatoes with mini-marshmallows on top, and at Christmas, he cooked a huge ham in it. “I cook vegetables, fish, meat, in it,” he said. “You name it.”
Peter
