The New Mighty Pizza Oven, Launching Soon on Kickstarter, Will Let Home Chefs Bake Pro-Quality Pizzas in 3-5 Minutes on Their Backyard Grill

HOUSTON, TX, May 12, 2013 (Press-News.org) Why is it so hard to bake professional-quality pizza in a regular home oven? This is the question that has troubled Texas engineer and entrepreneur Bert Touma for years as he enjoyed his hobby of baking pizza at home. Now, he not only has the answer, but is getting ready to bring delicious homemade pizza within everyone's reach with the upcoming launch of the Mighty Pizza Oven he designed. The Mighty Pizza Oven is an affordable stainless steel oven insert that uses a standard gas grill as a powerful heat source. It is designed to replicate the baking conditions inside professional brick ovens, baking pizzas to perfection in as little as 3-5 minutes. The Mighty Pizza Oven will be launched on Kickstarter in early June 2013 for just $259, including free US shipping to the 48 Continental States. Visit MightyPizzzaOven.com for more information.

"I believe homemade pizzas can be every bit as awesome as the best pizzeria pies out there," Bert explains. "The techniques involved in making great pizza are actually quite simple for anyone to master, but the problem is that regular home ovens are just not hot enough for baking pizza. This means you have to keep your pizza in the oven longer, which dries it out. Besides, domestic ovens are also bad at balancing the top and bottom heat, so you often end up with either burned pastry crust or undercooked toppings."

On the other hand, professional brick ovens like the ones used by pizzerias reach very high temperatures and are able to bake pizza quickly, crisping the outside of the dough and ingredients while preserving all the tasty, juicy goodness inside.

The Mighty Pizza Oven is designed to fit on top of most standard gas grills and uses the grill's intense heat to reproduce the ideal baking conditions inside a brick oven.

The pizza to be baked sits inside the Mighty Pizza Oven between two pizza stones made of materials with excellent heat transfer properties and that can stand rapid changes in temperature without cracking.

The bottom pizza stone is in direct contact with the grill's flame and acts like a brick oven's floor, storing heat and transferring it evenly and efficiently to the base of the pizza. This bottom stone is slightly smaller than the Mighty Pizza Oven, allowing an intense amount of heat from the grill to reach the top pizza stone, which reflects it back onto the top of the pizza, just like a brick oven's interior does. This melts the cheese in seconds, cooks the topping ingredients quickly, and gives the pizza a lovely golden-brown color. The Mighty Pizza Oven also has an adjustable vent system that works like a brick oven's chimney, drawing in humid outside air and circulating it over the pizza to make sure it doesn't dry out.

"As a big pizza lover, I had been trying to bake awesome pizza at home for years," Bert says. "I searched the Internet for ideas, experimented with different recipes and tried all sorts of tricks with my home oven without any success. That perfect bake just kept on eluding me. Eventually, I learned there is no substitute for a high-temperature oven when it comes to baking pizza. The thing is I wasn't ready to spend a lot of money on a bulky brick oven that took hours to heat up, so I figured my homemade pizzas were about as good as they were ever going to get. Then, one day I watched a restaurant chef grill my burger under a basting cover, and the idea for the Mighty Pizza Oven popped into my head. I got to work designing a miniature oven that bakes like a brick oven but can be operated like a basting cover. The result was this compact, highly energy efficient pizza oven."

The Mighty Pizza Oven is the result of a whole year's worth of prototyping and testing. It will be launched on the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter in early June 2013. After a very encouraging response from local pizza enthusiasts at the PizzaMaking.com forum who tried out the Mighty Pizza Oven in person and provided feedback, Bert Touma decided to produce the first batch of ovens in advance and reserve them for the fastest Kickstarter backers. The Mighty Pizza Oven will cost $259 for orders placed via Kickstarter, including free shipping in the 48 Continental United States -- a substantial discount on the eventual retail price of $349 + shipping. The ovens will be ready for delivery in early July, shortly after the project's funding deadline.

The Mighty Pizza Oven warms up quickly on a gas grill and reaches the ideal baking temperature quickly, making it very fuel efficient. It is also lightweight, compact and easy to set up and use, and can also be used on a large variety of heat sources as long as the heat is evenly distributed under the oven.

"I wanted a low-cost, practical pizza oven that bakes pizza just as well as a professional brick oven and I finally have one," says Bert Touma. "And now I am asking pizza lovers and the rest of the Kickstarter community to support the Mighty Pizza Oven project, so that everyone who wants to bake awesome pizza at home will be able to have one too! And by the way, this oven is capable of cooking much more than pizza. For example, you can grill vegetables or meat using a griddle instead of the bottom stone. This is an exciting new angle that I'm just starting to explore with great results so far, and I'm very excited to see how everybody else will be using their Mighty Pizza Ovens."

Bert already has big ideas to take the Mighty Pizza Oven to the next level once the Kickstarter drive is successful. He hopes to receive enough funding and support from the community to be able to design a number of optional lightweight burner bases to power the Mighty Pizza Oven using gas, charcoal/wood, or even chafing fuel. Any of these burners would make the Mighty Pizza Oven setup 100% portable, so it could be easily taken along on camping trips and tailgating. Bert also has plans for additional accessories, including a Mighty Pizza Oven cookbook, and is committed to work hard to make the homemade pizza experience the very best it could possibly be.

"My vision is that the Mighty Pizza Oven will one day become a familiar part of every household," he explains enthusiastically. "I see it being a treasured and durable kitchen tool, almost like that special cast iron pot or frying pan you pass down from generation to generation. I see the Mighty Pizza Oven doing for homemade pizza what the electric toaster did for sliced bread. I see a future where delicious, healthy, homemade pizza is easily within everyone's reach."

Full information is available at MightyPizzaOven.com, where budding pizza chefs will also find the Pizza 101 Blog, packed with all the tips tricks and recipes they need to perfect their skills. Final details about the Kickstarter launch will be posted on the website and on the Mighty Pizza Oven's Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/mightypizzaoven.

For more information, kindly contact:
Bert Touma
Managing Director
Eatery Next Door LLC
alberttouma@eaterynextdoor.com
Tel.: (832)303-2859

Bert Touma has over 20 years of engineering experience at top-tier, world class firms and continues to work in the oil and gas industry. He has been a homemade pizza enthusiast ever since he arrived in the US in 1982 and got his first job with a pizza chain. Since then he has experimented with a wide variety of pizza recipes and techniques in his quest for perfect homemade pizza. Realizing that home ovens are not adequate for baking pizza, he set about designing the Mighty Pizza Oven and now dreams of empowering fellow pizza lovers around the world to bake professional quality pizza in their own homes.