Summer Family Day Pizza Party

Our events and office intern, Bo, shares a blog from the Edinburgh Food Social x Edinburgh Food Project Summer Family Day today. A big shoutout to Ooni for generously donating us a pizza oven recently. This was its first outing and it was a total treat to be able to host a community pizza lunch!

We had some nice summer weather when we began loading a lot of food on our electric cargo bike for the Summer Family Day on 24th July. 

We had prepared vegetables suitable for a fresh summer slaw and ingredients with 10kg of pizza dough for attendees to roll. We also made a curried potato and cauliflower salad with pickled raisins and dill, and a summer leaf salad with a green dressing. 

Our dough was 66% white flour 33% wholemeal flour (strong bread) and the sauce was freshly made at the Edinburgh Food Social kitchen using roasted tomatoes.

It’s also exciting for us as we had Mirella who was volunteering for the first time with us. Mirella is Italian and was incredibly helpful with making pizza!

We saw plenty of new faces and some familiar ones at the Summer Family Day and we set up the place for everyone to get involved with making the slaw and making their own pizza. Everyone joined forces in (safe!) veg chopping with plastic safety knives and mats below chopping boards to keep them secure.

Everyone did an excellent job of cutting cabbage, radish, celery, and apples before we combined them with some vinegar and pickled onion. 

As we finished mixing the slaw, our community chef taught everyone how to stretch and roll out a pizza base. The kids were all excited and fighting for a spot to roll their pizza out. They had so much creative fun with the pizza base, making it as thin as possible and shaping it as a Mickey Mouse. 

No one could wait to get to top up their pizzas and get them in the Ooni oven. The topping station was abuzz as people picked between pepperoni, anchovies, jalapenos, onion and mushroom and finished with mozzarella on top. Once in the oven, the pizzas were ready in no time. It was our first time using the Ooni fire pizza ovens at a public event, which cook at nearly 400 degrees Celsius.

The kids began to appreciate the craft of cooking a pizza and were absolutely amazed at the quality of the pizza. Some couldn’t wait to make their second ones! They also reflected that the salads we prepared had changed their mind about eating greens. 

After a successful pizza lunch, the families enjoyed the circus as the EFS team wrapped up for the day.