r/pizzaoven

Built my own pizza oven. 48” cooking interior. Started with a big hole in the ground to put in the cement base then built up from there. Used fire board, firebricks and fire blanket along with the perlite coating and then stucco. Spent around $1200 on everything including the cement base.

I love it. I’m not a big diy guy (work in tech) and it took me around 3 - 4 months to put together on weekends and after work. No regrets. We have tons of pizza party’s, pizza cooks under a couple minutes and I can cook 6 pizzas at a time. Get a quarter cord of almond wood that I store underneath it.

Hi All, this is my second attempt at making pizzas in my arc. TxCraig suggested my previous dough balls looked under fermented so, this time I've given them a bit more time. I'm trying to learn how to read the dough rather than just follow a clock.
Recipe:
100% strong white bread flour
62% hydration
10% active sourdough starter
3% salt
Timeline:
9 am yesterday - 2h autolyse
11 am - Added starter + salt and mixed
~8h bulk fermentation at roughly 17–20°C
7 pm - Balled after 8h (240g each x 12), placed it two 7L trays
9 am today - 22h fermentation so far, around 17°C
Planning to bake in another ~8h (~30h total fermentation)
This is how the balls look after ~22h. They have expanded quite a lot and have plenty of small bubbles, but they're still holding their shape?
Would you consider these properly fermented, or are they getting close to over-fermented? Would you keep them at ~17°C for another 8 hours or slow them down?
I'm mainly trying to understand the fermentation spectrum and learn what the dough should look/feel like when it's in the good-to-great window.

I wanted to see how far I could push a very short fermentation, so I tried a simple 2-hour dough.

75% hydration
10 g fresh yeast per kg of flour
27 g salt per kg
Room temp around 23°C
Final dough temp around 26–27°C

After mixing, I let the dough rest for about 10 minutes, then made 275–280 g dough balls without tightening them too much.

About 2 hours later: bake time.

Baked in a PizzaParty Emozione on a Saputo stone at around 400°C, for roughly 90 seconds.

The result honestly surprised me. Very soft dough, easy to stretch, good volume and a much better texture than I expected from such a short fermentation.

Definitely not the same profile as a long fermentation, but for a same-day pizza it worked surprisingly well.

Has anyone else here experimented with very short fermentation times?

Disclosure: PizzaParty provided me with the oven for testing. The test and opinions are my own.