Stefano Ferrara
The art of oven: when the architecture makes a perfect food

The Ferrara family builds ovens for pizza for almost seventy years. They not only follow conventional patterns of constructing, they also keep the tradition and plan better techniques to improve the resistance of structures and materials.

Stefano Ferrara proudly points out one of the oldest furnaces that his father did, which is at the Pizzeria Brandi in Naples. The structure of the oven may vary, but a good pizza needs the right proportions, the products of Campania, the right temperature and secrets like the ingredients that the great chefs hide. The pizza cooking surface, the so-called Sorrento’s cookie (clay mixed with volcanic clay) allows you to reach the fair temperature; the bricks (the very delicate bricks of Santa Maria have been replaced by more resistant refractory bricks) are used to consume a smaller amount of wood and to protect the alchemical process of cooking the pizza; the dome allows each Neapolitan feel at home, completing the ritual of eating pizza  with care and devotion.

The pizza makers continue to emigrate, taking flavors, colors and scents to every corner of the world; however, they need to use conventional ovens, which need the right ingredients in order to come to life,  just like a dish.  For this reason, the best pizzeria in the world have the ovens built in loco, so that the heat of the Vesuvius lava, which contributed to the birth of the pizza, is somehow exported.