Making Pizza with a Morso Forno

Everybody loves pizza, and the idea of making your own at home in the yard or garden with a proper wood fired oven is ever-tempting. But installing a great, big stone oven can be discouraging. The Morsø forno, designed and created in Denmark, is a compact and highly effective wood fired oven that can be moved around and looks really good. Alex Mattei tried it out.

Left to right: Justin Attard Montalto, Alex Mattei, Philip Grech

“I was delighted to try out one of these ovens. I was surprised as to how quickly it reached cooking temperature – 45 minutes from when the fire was first lit, and each pizza was ready in three minutes, much faster than I could make the next one. So the only thing to do is have them lined up ready to go, and even though you can only cook one pizza at a time, five pizzas are done in 15 minutes.”

This is a proper wood-fired pizza oven – once the burning wood gets going, you push it aside and make way for the pizza, which cooks with the wood burning behind it.
I got to work with my tried and tested pizza recipe which I normally use in a domestic oven, and the comparison was stark. The pizza I made in the wood-fired oven looked and tasted so much better, picking up the woody scent and flavour. If you have the space – not very much required, as it is compact – and like pizza, this is a good thing to have. I’d like one myself.

Now here is my basic pizza recipe, to which you can then add ingredients as you like them. You will always need homemade dough and some good tomato sauce. You can make this by slowly cooking fresh or canned tomatoes with a little garlic, basil and olive oil, but as the tomato season goes into full swing, I strongly recommend using ripe, red fresh tomatoes and making up a batch which you can then freeze for later use.
A good, classic Neapolitan pizza uses fresh buffalo-milk mozzarella. Tear these up and set them to drain off in a colander in your kitchen sink. Dried oregano is also a basic pizza ingredient, and you might want some fresh basil with that mozzarella.

Making the pizza dough

Serves 6

You will need:

1kg strong flour (and some extra for dusting)
2-3 teaspoons salt
20g dried yeast
650ml lukewarm water semolina for dusting or olive oil for stretching out

  1. Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water until it is frothing
  2. Add the salt to the our and pour it in the water with the dissolved yeast. This is initially very sticky
  3. Work this for several minutes until smooth. Turn the dough out onto a oured surface using some of the extra flour and some semolina. Knead this for about 10 minutes or until smooth
  4. Place the dough in a bowl covered with a warm damp cloth. It should start to rise to about double the size
  5. Knock this down and cut it into 6 individual pieces. Knead each one until evenly smooth. Dust it liberally and cover it with the damp cloth
  6. Allow space between each piece as these will rise to double their size
  7. Once these have risen again, start to stretch them out into evenly shaped circles. Top them with tomato sauce and ingredients of your choice.Bake them.
  8. The pizza took about 3 minutes to cook in the wood fired oven. If you’re using the oven in your kitchen, put the pizza on a metal baking tray and cook for about 7-8 minutes.

Make the Tomato and Basil Sauce

You will need:

1kg fresh tomatoes
2 garlic cloves
5 basil leaves
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
olive oil

  1. Put the tomatoes in a large bowl and pour enough boiling water over them to cover them. After a few minutes, remove them from the water and slip off the skins. Quarter them. Remove and discard the seeds.
  2. Chop the flesh In a deep, wide frying-pan, fry the garlic in olive oil until translucent, taking care not to let it brown and burn. Add the chopped tomatoes, torn basil leaves, sugar and pepper. Stir every few minutes over very low heat until this reduces to about two-thirds of the original volume, and the sauce is thick and rich.

The Morso Forno – Use it all year round

Atmost sell the Morsø Foro through their base in Attard. The Danish company Morsø has been making cast iron stoves for more than 160 years, and the striking forno is a natural evolution of that, designed by award-winning Danish designer Klaus Rath.

A Morsø outdoor oven is summer heaven but spreads warmth outdoors in winter and enables you to prepare crisp, crunchy pizzas and perfect bread in just a few minutes, all year round.

Internally, the oven is shaped like an Italian stone oven. The wide, low-ceilinged rebox produces optimal radiant heat and plenty of space for firewood to be pushed aside when it’s time to cook. The oven itself is made of solid cast iron coated in enamel and will last for years. If you use another product – the Morsø Tuscan grill – in the oven, you can also cook steaks and vegetables.