On the third day of our field trip to Wisconsin, we had dinner at the Third Street Deli in Pepin. I had checked with them about some questions I had, so that when I arrived, I was recognized. We actually stopped by twice, once before they were heating the oven and later after they started serving food out of the oven.
The oven was built last year. It was more massive than they were expecting.
The oven is part of an outdoor kitchen with some counter seating and an outdoor patio. There is some shelter from the weather while still being out of doors.
It's a pretty big oven. It looks like a relative big barrel-vault oven instead of a hemispherical oven more typical of a pizza-only oven.
They have some of the tools that I would expect for a wood-fired oven, but not all of them. (It's enough for what they do.)
Once the oven is heated up, they keep a fire in the back to keep the temperature up. That takes some practice to regulate and to cook with.
Here are a couple of calzones in the oven.
One got a little charred. This is apparently a rare problem, and they remade the item (for free of course) for the people who ordered it.
This is a "before" picture of my margherita pizza.
This is the "after" picture of my pizza. It pretty much comes out of the oven and then to the table. (It was only about 5 minutes before the pizza going in and me taking the after picture. Part of that was remembering to get my camera out before I ate the pizza.)
I thought it was a very reasonable price for the pizza ($8). Unlike A to Z Produce (the Pizza Farm), the Third Street Deli does not specialize in pizza; they have a lot of other offerings. (My wife really liked the roasted beet salad.)
The next time I'm in the neighborhood of Pepin on a day when A to Z is closed and Third Street Deli is open (Thursday through Sunday), I would happily go there again for pizza or for something else on the menu.
