The beginning of this year's pizza season started off with an interesting event for GoreMade Pizza. One of my ingredient providers needed the use of my wood fired oven for a product demonstration at their annual food show. They had an italian pizza chef (who didn't speak a lick of english) flown in to demonstrate a new kind of flour entering the market. I'm not in the business of renting my oven, so I was hesitant at first. In the end, they hired me and the oven and all was well.
The staff you see in this picture was my trusty walking staff for nearly 2 years (photo by craig bortmas). I found it in my back yard and cut it down myself. The stuff of fairy tales, I tell ya. I took it with me every time I went walking with my son, and spent a lot of time caring for it. It sent me on many crazy and interesting adventures, and started a whole new chapter of my life. Sadly, this year at comfest, the staff was stolen from the art car tent on the last day. Coincidentally, one of my art car friends, Bob Madrid, had recently started carving walking sticks out of wood he'd been drying out the last 5 years. He brought a small army of them to show off at the festival. He mentioned carving one for me in passing and I told him I had all the staff I needed, but appreciated the offer. That was until my staff was pilfered. Now without, he has agreed to carve me my very own staff. In exchange, I agreed to do a pizza event for his 25th wedding anniversary. That event was Sunday, July 28th. Sunday, June 3rd, GoreMade Pizza went out to Powell for its first graduation party from 3:00-6:00 pm, asked to feed 30 people. One of the owners of Via Vecchia Winery, who are gracious enough to allow me to use their Commercial Kitchen for its commissary, had me out with the oven to make pizzas for their son's Graduation Party. It was such an awesome experience, excluding a couple things I'll know for next time.
Fight songs from movies raced through my head the morning of the competition. I was up by 6:30 am(!) and down to the kitchen to evaluate and collect all my things. Risin up, back on the street Did my time, took my chances In my head, I'm a boxer in the movies with quick feet, swinging some gloved jabs into the innocent air in front of me as I walk out to the crowd roar and cameras flashing like the fourth of july. Went the distance Now I'm back on my feet Just a man and his will to survive The morning was long, and no roar of the crowd greeted me as I passed through the show room doors into the emptiness of early arrival. I made my way to the area of the competition after checking in. It seemed like hours before anyone even told us what was going on. I had prepared myself for nervousness and isolation. Previous years being a convention goer, I was a dough-eyed wanderer in the belly of the beast trying to figure out what the hell I'm actually getting myself into. But it turned out to be quite the opposite once the day started moving. My companion and only supporter in this sea of newness was my friend Greg Phelps. Many people know him as the guy with the baby doll heads on his car, though he's got a new and somewhat less baby doll headed art car. You may also know him as stop #417 on the Columbus Public Art Walk coming soon! He's an event organizer by trade and has some connections at the convention center, so he pulled some strings and got into the event without having to pay the $34.95 to enter. He turned out to be my eye in the sky roving reporter, taking all the pictures in this blog post and putting them up on facebook as the situation unfolded. My wife (and probably many others) was following his posts, kept abreast by his awesomeness! It was great to know someone in the audience, rooting for me in the middle of the mayhem. He didn't have the goremade body paint, pepperoni bikini nor the air horn he said he'd bring with him, but his support was more than enough! After checked in, we were handed an envelope containing several papers of various officialness. One paper assigned each competitor a number that served as our identification for the event and which corresponded to one half of a 6 ft table that was our space for the competition. I was number 27 for the day. The Pizza: Pirate's Booty Ingredients: Dungeness Crab, Chipotle Aioli, Boursin, Truffled Olive Oil and Smoked Sea Salt. I spent the better part of two weeks working out the best way to take those ingredients and make the best pizza I could make, practicing on 8" pizzas to save on ingredient costs. This is the first time I'd attempted to really perfect a pizza, as I'd only ever made it a couple times in the past. Everyone else in the Pizza Pizzazz competition was making a pizza that they'd made countless times in day-to-day business, where as I was flyin' by the seat of my pants. I'd never even made a 16" pizza, and found that I didn't really know how to stretch a dough that big, so I was going in this thing a bit unprepared. But I had drive and confidence and passion and readiness! It's the eye of the tiger It's the thrill of the fight Risin' up to the challenge Of our rival Once they announced the beginning of the competition, there was a rush of unpacking and preparing around me. They had only announced the first 5 competitors and I was a little confused why so many people were getting busy. After a little investigation, I found myself to be among the very last in the list of competitors with time to kill. There was no timeframe. A simple "not for a while" was all I could get, keeping me close for most of the day. I soon realized how cool it was to be surrounded by people with a similar passion for pizza! I walked the tables, peering into secret ingredients and techniques, honed over years of practical application. I saw shrimp, squash, corn, peppadew. Pizzas that looked more like salads. Dough paper thin and three inches thick. Knives, pans, dockers. Corn meal and flour. So many different ingredients, equipment and techniques to take in. Among the competitors from all over the country, I was also able to meet several pizza folk from the columbus area, which was super cool! Gary from Clever Crow, Eric from Dewey's Pizza, Peter from Figlio, John from Avalanche Pizza in Athens, OH (who also has a great pizza web blog as the pizza goon!). It was nice to be able to chat with these guys and pick their brains, being able to meet the competition and start things off on a friendly note. Eric from Dewey's invited me to come hang out and play some sunday before they opened. He also said he'd lend some pizza people to help out when I start the whole mobile pizza thing! Super nice guy. Back on the competition floor, someone forgot dusting flour, so I handed him my bag. It was like that. Anything that anyone needed was supplied by a neighbor. "Anyone have a knife?". An enthusiastic "Here you go" came in an instant. There was a sense of camaraderie that I didn't anticipate. It poured over the competition floor like a warm breeze in the dead of winter. We all were there to win, mind you. But we were all unified by the glory and the love of pizza. I ended up meandering in the area where they brought the left-overs that the judges didn't finish off, so there was a constant flow of deliciousness. They weren't labeled, so it was blind consumption. But there were some delicious flavor combinations and really interesting textures. Every pizza was a different kind of delicious. It made me realize how difficult it would be to compare such different pizzas and pick a winner. After many many many minutes, the final call was given for anyone who had not yet made their pizzas to start. I was in that group, so I scuttled off to do what I truly came here to do. You're the best, around Nothin's gonna ever keep ya down You're the best, around Nothin's gonna ever keep ya doooooown Most everyone had made their pizza by the time I was up. I couldn't decide if it was advantageous or disadvantageous to go last, but that didn't matter. It was time. The one thing my mother said to me was to remember to have fun! This was indeed the most important thing. Winning and losing are second to enjoyment. If I win after a hideous day, it would be a hollow win. A loss after a great experience is still a great experience. I made my pizza with a smile ear to ear. I had heard some talk about past ovens being quite unsatisfying, but this year was absolutely not that. They have two ovens available for use. A conveyer oven and a deck oven. Conveyer ovens are just that. You put a pizza in a pan and send it through a conveyer that cooks it and you pick it up at the other end. A deck oven is any oven that you can cook a pizza directly on the floor. This specific oven was a Woodstone Dual Gas Fired oven, with flames on both the left and right sides of the oven. They were independently adjustable, allowing for temperature adjustments for each side. After using my mobile wood fired oven, it was like going from a 1984 Ford Fiesta to a 2012 fully equipped Cadillac XTS. It was an easy cook, and I could see the ease of cooking many pizzas at a time with it, as opposed to the tight space of my home wood fired oven and the one-at-a-time routine I've adapted. In the application, I asked for a 600º oven. When it was my time, the temp gage one inch into the floor of the oven read 480º with an assumed internal temp of 525º. Surprisingly, it worked out perfectly! They told us the announcement for the final 6 would be announced in 15 minutes, so we waited. The MC of the event came out and there was a hush. He started listing the numbers of the contestants who made it to the finals, there being 7 instead of 6 as there was a tie. Listing them in numerical order, he began: 1, 6, 14... his skip from 26 to 33 made me sharply aware that I was not advancing to the final round. Surprisingly, I felt pretty good. I did the best I knew how to do, and that's all I could ask for. Winning $6,000 would have been a great boost in start-up capital, but the event took me to another level, which is priceless!
So many time, it happens too fast You trade your passion for glory Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past You must fight just to keep them alive Not making it to the final round left me with enough ingredients for two more 16" pizzas, so I invited Greg and his wife Danuta over to enjoy the spoils of our loss. I stuck around long enough to see the guy from Figlio make his pizza, which looked pretty amazing (Ahi tuna with all sorts of garnishes), then headed home for a bit of a rest, missing the final verdict for a nice respite and to tell the tale to my wife. At the end of the day, I felt pretty good about things. I met so many wonderful folk and made some new pizza friends. I got shirts and business cards printed. This was something that needed to be done, but I was failing to do. I used the momentum of the event to push me over a couple humps. I also got to involve myself in a professional event, going toe to toe with the best of em! And I'll be much better prepared for next year! I felt good about my pizza, and I felt good about my performance. It gave me something to talk about, and it's keeping me going. And every picture in this blog shows me with a grin on my face! This can't be a bad thing. One more step in the right direction! The plan for GoreMade Pizza has always been to have a wood fired pizza oven as the cooking device. It's highly regarded in the business and the heat source is super abundant in our area. Not to mention that it's a completely renewable resource! I'd never had the privilege of using a wood fired pizza oven before and was having trouble finding a way to get in front of one just to know what I'm getting myself into. I was beginning to think I'd have to get a job somewhere that has one just to get to know the art form.
A couple sundays ago, I was invited... actually I invited myself, over to a friend's house who had mentioned having a small wood fired oven in his back yard. I brought 5 dough balls and a bunch of topping over to play. Holy Pizza Pie, you guys... it changed my pizza life! Saturday, August 13th, 2011, GoreMade Pizza was invited to be the "food vendor" for a mock-festival party at Hockenhaus. From 7-9 pm, I made pizza in Brian's lovely kitchen. By the way, his kitchen totally kicks ass! I made a total of 8 pizzas over the two hour happy hour. We were trying to figure out how to handle the monetary situation so that brian and I weren't footing the bill for 60 or so people to eat pizza. Brian suggested having a tip jar out for everyone to pay what they want. I was interested in how it would turn out, so we tried it.
It turns out that I got almost exactly what the ingredients cost me, which was awesome. I got to spread the GoreMade name around, got some really positive feedback from practically everyone who tried it out, and I got to step up my production, making more dough at one time that had ever previously been attempted. All of which encourage growth and a better understanding of the goals I am striving for! |
AuthorNick Gore was a corporate peon by day who just made the leap to full time pizza geek. Follow his path to world class Pizzaiolo right here on the GoreMade Pizza blog. Archives
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