050/18 – Uuni 3 Pizza:
The last Uuni 3 Pizza session resulted in my best pizzas so far, time for another go!
THE INGREDIENTS:
Flour: Molino Grassi 00 flour – £11.22 for 10kg from Amazon.
THE DOUGH:
The recipe for the dough was from “The Pizza Bible” by Tony Gemignani, really good book with loads of great content in it. I am planning on working my way through the book!
The Book is £18.79 on Amazon.
This dough recipe is different to my usual one because you make a Poolish starter the day before you make the pizza dough. I kept it at room temperature for 18 hours then put it in the fridge for 30 minutes to cool.
Next day I made the pizza dough using the Poolish then left it to rest at room temperature for 20 minutes. Next I split the dough into 6 lots of 255 grams each then shaped it into dough balls before putting them into my plastic trays and placing these in the fridge for 40 hours. I made double the dough this time planning to cook extra pizzas to put in the freezer for the kids to eat during the week.
This recipe is for the Napoletana Dough on page 187 and uses the Poolish starter on page 47.
THE KIT:
6 litre food grade container with lid – £5.24 from Amazon
Food grade pizza dough trays (x3) – £22.95 from Amazon
Looftlighter – £55.09 from Amazon
Wooden Pizza Peel – £9.99 from Amazon
The Sauce:
Last time I made the Neopolitan sauce from The Pizza Bible but I found it a bit weak tasting and preferred Kenji’s New York Style Pizza Sauce so I went back to that for this run.
Lighting the Fire:
Slightly modified my fire lighting technique lately, almost a full hopper of pellets with a flamer at the front.
Flamer lit. 
Slotted in to the Uuni 
Leave it 2 minutes for a few pellets to take and then whack a looftlighter up the rear vents for a couple of minutes.
Looftlighters are £55.09 on Amazon, really handy for turbo charging your Uuni fire and essential kit for lighting BBQ’s too.
Hold it for 2 minutes like this
Then put the Jam Funnel on top (£6.25 on Amazon) – this expands your pellet hopper and keeps the fire burning to allow you to focus on making and cooking the pizza without worrying too much about keeping the fire going.
Fill it up with pellets
After 1 minute of looftlighter. 
10 minutes from lighting the flamer 
5 minutes later (15 minutes from lighting the flamer) – it’s over 550c. 
The Cook:
Last time the Napoletana Dough was really soft, very stretchy and produced some great leoparding. However, from the 3 pizzas I destroyed the first 2 and fluked the last one! I should have read my notes from the last cook as I struggled with the first few this time.
Big change this time was to use the wooden pizza peel to launch the pizza rather than the Uuni metal one. Last time the pizzas were sticking as the dough is so wet, the wooden pizza peel was a total game changer, much easier to launch the pizzas and with minimal flour added too. £10 well spent!
Pizza 1: I used Mozarella pearls for the first time on this cook, they didn’t really melt on the first pizza. The shape wasn’t great either.
Pizza 2: The shape was awful! I tried to stretch the dough by hand holding it up but it just dropped and stretched too thin. You can see a hole in the middle, the dough was so thin the metal peel caught it when I went to spin it. I split the mozzarella pearls this time and they melted better. I gave this one to the kids, they seemed to enjoy it!
Pizza 3: Bit better. Shape better and some decent leoparding on the crust but room for improvement. Main change here was before lifting the dough ball I floured the top, when I scooped the dough ball up I flipped it over and floured the other side which helped make it more manageable to stretch. I tried to stretch it without going too thin.
Pizza 4: At last! Shape not perfect but better, nice leoparding and good levels of sauce cook and cheese melting. 
Pizza 5: I should have been on a roll, I was working out the best way to handle the dough. Then I rushed this one as the kids were playing up! As I launched the pizza one end was stuck to the peel so it stretched it out of shape.
Pizza 6: Not too bad but I ran out of Chorizo so had to use big slices of Salami! The Jam Pourer was low on pellets and I didn’t fill it up to save wastage but the fire control wasn’t great without the chimney cap on. Lesson for next time, either keep the pourer topped up or remove it and put the chimney cap on. Decent pizza but lower temperature so it was a bit baked. Still tasty!
Summary:
Love pizzas off the Uuni 3, such a great bit of kit and a bargain for £200!
The Jam Pourer and Looftlighter make a massive difference to pellet/fire control and make that a lot easier. Allows you to concentrate on making/cooking the pizzas rather than managing the fire as well.
The Wooden Pizza Peel was brilliant, made it so much easier to launch the pizzas. Will use that in future.
2nd time using this dough recipe. It’s a really wet dough and very stretchy so you have to be quite careful stretching it. Notes for myself for next time:
- Flour the top before lifting the dough ball.
- Flip the dough ball and flour the other side.
- Stretch carefully and slowly on the worktop not by lifting it!
- Probably make the dough balls smaller. 255g is a big pizza for the Uuni, better to have it smaller and easier to lift/rotate.
Other notes for next time:
- Smaller meat is better, get more on! Need to get back to East Coast Cured to stock up.
- Really gone off Mozzarella, quite a tasteless cheese. Going to cold smoke some cheese and use that instead, will try a few different ones.
Provolone is a nice tasty cheese which works well on pizzas also, whatever pizza I do I always top off with Parmesan. Lovely!
Hi Steve, thanks for that. Will try and get some Provolone to try, good shout on the Parmesan – will do that too!