There’s a new pizza place in town, and it’s run by the chefs at Bellerose.
The Bellerose Business Venture group held its first pizza sale Wednesday morning, serving up handmade thin-crust pizzas made in its new wood-fired oven.
The sale was so popular that many students had to settle for a complimentary Caesar salad – the pizzas sold out in three minutes.
“Thanks for being patient with us, guys,” supervisor Jason Dabbagh told the crowd.
“I’m going to give a scathing review!” quipped student Liam McCoy, who was at the head of the line.
The Bellerose Business Venture is a student-owned and operated business run by members of Dabbagh’s Food and Business course. Founded in 2012, it teaches students entrepreneurial skills and puts on for-profit community dinners.
The students use the profits from those dinners to invest in new cooking equipment each year, Dabbagh says. Having bought a batch freezer and meat smoker in previous years, the class decided this year to get a wood-fired oven.
Dabbagh says students built the oven themselves last July with the help of Chad Moss of Shovel and Fork – a local food education group that started the Northlands Urban Farm in Edmonton earlier this year. Nelson Lumber and Alliance Refractories donated some $1,000 in materials for the project.
The finished oven is the size of a small shed and resembles a brick cabin. Its dome-shaped interior is made from handmade bricks composed of local clay and flax straw.
The oven is very versatile and can be used to cook vegetables, desserts and many other non-pizza dishes, Dabbagh says.
“You can get this oven to over 1,000 degrees (Celsius) if you want to,” he notes.
The oven is designed so that a fire shoved to one side of it will send flames curling over the food in the middle, says student Kyle VanRooijen. You can tell the fire is at the right temperature for pizza by tossing in some flour; if it burns in about five seconds, it’s pizza time.
The aim is to keep the oven at about 650 C to 750 C, he continues. That gives you a crisp crust, cooks the ingredients and puts a light char on the edge.
It also means that your pizza is cooked in about 60 seconds.
Pizza outlets such as Famoso Pizzeria also use high-temperature ovens like this, but those ones are propane-powered and automatically rotate their pizzas, VanRooijen says.
There’s sort of a romantic appeal to wood-fired ovens, Dabbagh continues. You’re making your own food using a technology that people built with their own hands thousands of years ago.
“It’s as local as you can get.”
The 15-member Business Venture squad served 15 pizzas in roughly 20 minutes. On offer were a three-cheese pizza and a margherita pie.
McCoy tried both, and says the pizzas were awesome.
“I love pizza of all sorts,” he says – everything from traditional Italian to greasy American – and the taste of these ones was comparable to Famoso’s.
“You can tell they used good ingredients.”
It will be up to the team to decide if they want to make pizza day a regular event at Bellerose, Dabbagh says. The team already plans to use its oven to make a three-course pizza meal at its Oct. 1 community dinner.
Dabbagh says the team has no plans to compete against other local pizzerias, though.
“We’re just doing what’s unique to our program.”
Tickets for the dinner are $21. Visit https://www.facebook.com/BelleroseBV for details.
