MEAT LOVER WINEMAKER SERVES UP FRESH CUTS.
America’s home cooks are renowned for their serial affairs with kitchen appliances, from the immersion circulator to the Instapot. For a brief while, everyone needs the gadget du jour. Then, typically, the infatuation subsides and the thing moves to the basement.
But if one culinary device has shown enduring, ever-growing allure, it’s the woodfired pizza oven. Andrea Mugnaini, founder of Mugnaini Imports in Healdsburg, can confirm that trajectory. In 1989, she imported 10 ovens that her Italian supplier doubted would sell. Now, nearly 30 years later, Mugnaini has sold tens of thousands.
Thanks largely to Mugnaini, the humble Italian forno is now an American status symbol — a familiar presence in high-end home kitchens and in restaurants with a Mediterranean bent. To call it a pizza oven is to sell it short, Mugnaini says. In her view, these ovens can do almost anything.
“People are blown away by all the different dishes that can come out of the ‘pizza’ oven,” says Mugnaini, who teaches chefs and home cooks how to maximize the oven’s potential in workshops at her Healdsburg showroom.
A Mugnaini oven is built for performance. Its dense firebrick floor draws and holds the fire’s heat; the insulated crown stores heat overhead, balancing the thermal mass and radiating heat downward. A flue in the front of the oven sucks air into the cooking chamber, then up and over the food. Because the burning wood emits moisture, roasts and other foods don’t dry out, Mugnaini says.
When fired with hardwood to their maximum temperature — about 700 degrees Fahrenheit on the floor, considerably higher near the ceiling — her ovens produce crusty, flame-licked pizza in two to three minutes. A resourceful cook can exploit the heat all the way down, putting a roast in the oven when the temperature descends to 550 degrees Fahrenheit; baking bread at 450 degrees Fahrenheit; then putting a pot of beans inside to simmer overnight.
Mugnaini, a California native, had her oven epiphany in Tuscany. During a business trip there in the 1980s, the former trauma nurse turned wine importer watched as Italian cooks pulled delicious home-cooked dishes from their wood-burning ovens. Convinced that Americans would be as smitten as she was, Mugnaini tracked down an Italian manufacturer, Forni Valoriani, and persuaded the skeptical owners to sell her a few ovens. She is now the firm’s biggest customer.
Mugnaini imports the core elements — the Italian firebrick floor and the refractoryclay crown — and workers assemble the modular ovens in her 14,000-square-foot Healdsburg facility. The custom exterior is purely aesthetic; buyers can choose their own style. “People get hung up on how they look on the outside,” Mugnaini says. But it’s the functionality of the internal components that explains why establishments like Chez Panisse (her first restaurant account), Flour & Water and Pizzaiolo have Mugnaini ovens.
For years, Mugnaini taught classes only to people who purchased her ovens. But two years ago, she moved her headquarters and showroom from Watsonville to Healdsburg, and now visitors to Wine Country can sign up for the wood-fired cooking experience. Mugnaini hereself teaches a three-hour entry-level class at the showroom, demonstrating how to heat the oven, manage the fire, make pizza dough and cook a variety of pizzas. The class concludes with — what else? — a pizza lunch.
Students with more time to burn, so to speak, can take Mugnaini’s three-day workshop at her restored farmhouse and vineyard in the Alexander Valley. She fires up the seven indoor and outdoor ovens on the 30-acre property, and students tackle dishes from pizza to paella to bread pudding.
“It’s a luxury total immersion,” says Mugnaini. “People come as part of their Wine Country vacation.”