My adventure with pizza is not really new at all. 20 years ago I remember my mother trying to make pizza at home at my request. It was a dough bought from the bakery, on top of which we were laying some yellow cheese and ham. Everything was baked in the oven and we were adding a lot of ketchup on top to give it a taste. Oh... what a fake pizza we were eating back then ....
Later, when I had my own bread machine I was so excited to revisit the pizza recipe. I learned in the meantime that for pizza not every cheese is good, and the must have ingredient was mozzarella. Then, for a good pizza you need high temperatures, so I put my oven at the maximum it could manage, meaning 275ºC .With this improvements, my pizza started to have a taste and it could have been called easily an OK homemade home pizza.
Next improvement came with the pizza stone that I was using for bread baking. I wanted a pizza that could be hold in your hands with a sturdy dough. Baking the pizza in a tray will never lead you to such strong dough. The pizza stone fulfilled my dream. There was however another problem.... the whole mess that the flour was doing to my oven and to my kitchen when sliding it to the hot stone. Due to all these issues, pizza was not a regular recipe done in my house.

BUT, everything changed last year when I had my wood fired oven. With the same old dough recipe and almost the same set of ingredients, a pizza baked in this oven is incomparable to any bake I tried in a conventional oven.
First of all, the pizza can go in the wood fired oven at a very high temperature. I usually bake my pizza when the oven is at 400-500ºC. No way you could reach this high temperature with a conventional oven. With this temperature, it takes less then 2 minutes to have 2 pizzas baked in the same time. As I normally bake 4 pizzas, the next set probably takes 5 minutes as the temperature goes down a bit.
And when my 4 pizzas are ready, also my oven gets the right temperature to bake the loaves of bread.
This is how I arrived to make pizza every week, together with my weekly bread.
The big secret of this pizza is the taste. Compared to the same pizza baked 15 minutes in a conventional oven at the highest possible temperature, the one baked in the wood fired oven for less than 2 minutes has a smokey flavor that changes the whole thing. The bread baked in a wood fire oven is definitely more tasty than the conventional one but the pizza is having a huge difference. That's the reason why, we simply cannot stop making pizza every week together with the bread.
It is by far the best pizza I have ever eat in any restaurant so far, also because you can choose what toppings to add and how much of each.

I reached perfection in terms of pizza and I am so happy that after all the adventure it took to arrive to it, I can proudly call it a success.

The toppings, I usually change them based on what I have at hand, but there are some that needs to be there: mozzarella, concentrated tomato sauce and ham.
As for the dough, I use the same quick recipe. I wonder if changing the recipe to a more fancy one, with sourdough for example, this would have an impact in taste. Is there a better best? That is something to try in the future.

Rustic round bread freshly baked in an wood fire oven. Anybody comes with the butter?

This is another type of bread raised over night in order to be baked the next day during the daylight (considering that we are in the winter and the days are shorter). Keeping the dough outside or in the fridge for the first fermentation helps with saving some time in the baking day.

As most of the times, this bread is made with sourdough, my preferred way to do raise a bread.

I have find out about the benefits of the black sesame quite recently. Besides that has a stronger aroma, the black sesame has higher nutritional properties than the the normal white sesame.
A good friend of mine was telling me that she was eating black sesame with any food. Another friend of mine was advertising it as a miracle ingredient to improve the immune system. Well, I am usually skeptical when it comes to new ingredients that comes and go in fashion these days. However, as I knew that during the winter the probability to get a cold is very high I decided to give it a try.
It is not bread that I am talking about, but a mixture between grounded black sesame and honey from which I take a half of teaspoon every morning straight after waking up. I do not know if it is just a pure coincidence or this really works but so far the cold avoided me this winter. For a mother with a young baby who often wakes up during the night, keeping a good immune system is essential.
Following the current success of this recipe I was thinking to include the black sesame also in bread so here it is what I managed to bake.