Don't Skip This Important Step When Using Your Outdoor Pizza Oven

An outdoor pizza oven is great for hosting dinner parties or for whipping up dinner for the family in flame-cooked style. And countertop options, like the Ooni Multifuel Outdoor Pizza Oven, make the whole process more convenient. This countertop outdoor oven quickly heats up to cooking temperatures of up to 950 degrees Fahrenheit and cooks a pizza in about a minute. It's great for a quick and satisfying dinner, and it looks cool while you're cooking. You're sure to impress your guests as you build a pizza for them right on the pizza peel before shoving it into your oven to cook. What looks like a tricky process really isn't — that is, if you have everything planned out right. That's where a little phrase from the French comes in handy, a concept known as "mise en place."

Mise en place translates to "putting in place" in English, and it describes the practice of organizing your workspace before you start cooking. It means you gather your supplies, weigh out ingredients, and stage your area before you start making anything. This is especially helpful when you're making pizza because the project requires so many tools and ingredients like toppings that require prep work. And when you're working with an outdoor oven that cooks at lightning speed, the crucial step of mise en place helps you move just as fast to prevent the whole thing from burning.

Most of us use some semblance of mise en place when we're making pizza, building it in stages that are somewhat organized no matter how it's cooked in the end. At the very least, you make the dough first (roll it out thin and even, like Paul Hollywood suggests) and let it rest while you retrieve all of your other ingredients. But, you'll make your life a whole lot easier if you apply the concept further and stage the rest of your project, too. Stage your pizza toppings in your outdoor cooking space so you can be quick and efficient when it comes time to make your pizza. Chop ingredients like vegetables and meat, or underrated pizza toppings like peppadew peppers or purple potatoes, into easily accessible, separate containers.

If you have every ingredient and tool, including the pizza peel, pizza cutter, and large cutting board, clean and ready to go when you start, you'll be able to be fast and efficient when it comes to pizza building and serving. You'll be able to quickly assemble ingredients onto the crust and get that pie into the oven before the dough sticks to the pizza peel. And if you keep everything organized as you're cooking, you'll be able to react quickly a few minutes later and get that pizza out of the oven before it burns.