Scott's Pizza Tour Pizza News  The Rise and Fall and Rise of
Coal  August 2, 2011  Our obsession with brick ovens is a
fascination with the ability to harness fire itself. Ever since
Prometheus stole lightning from Mt. Olympus, we’ve been
entranced by the power of an unpredictable flickering flame.
Although we’ve been baking breads in simple brick enclosures for
six thousand years, ovens still carry an air of mystery that we
can’t seem to shake. I’d like to take a close-up look at perhaps
the most enchanting of pizza baking structures: the coal-fired
oven. The once-necessary-then-obsolete-now-re-popularized coal
oven has an interesting past that traces the story of pizza
development in the Northeastern USA.  Those who have experienced
the goodness of a coal-fired oven may take for granted the
resulting pizza’s crisp yet chewy texture, but how did these
chunks of black rock get into our ovens? Coal was already a
dominant heating fuel when Neapolitan immigrants landed in the
United States in the 1880’s. Newly a