When we ‘inaugurated’ our home-made wood-fired cob oven with an afternoon of pizzas recently, Ojai Valley News columnist Mel Bloom was on the scene!  (note: while we love our old-fashioned backyard clay oven, it can only be used in the creation of our own family meals.)

Ojai Valley News • Friday, Aug. 29, 2014

Local chef creates poetry with pizza

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING                                            MEL BLOOM

The accouterments of an affluent household can be many. They can be, among other things, a swimming pool, wine cellar, gymnasium, tennis court, a screening room. And some residences have them all. Recently Sweetie and I attended a party at the home of longtime friends, the DiGregorios, Ben and Kerry. And we saw there for the first time what could be classified the ultimate status symbol, an outdoor pizza baking oven. Although Ben and Kerry are the least status-seeking people we know, and who in all likelihood would be mortified if their friends looked on the oven as such a symbol, there is ample reason it is the first pizza oven we have ever seen outside a pizzeria.

Like Miniver Cheevy, a fictional character in a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ben Di- Gregorio was born too late. Unlike Miniver who regretted he wasn’t born during epic moments of history, Ben counts his blessings and recognizes the wonder of life and its accompanying miracles even in these precarious times. But I believe Ben, comfortable in any milieu, would have been more at home during the Renaissance.

In the first place, Ben DiGregorio sounds as imposing as Lorenzo De Medici or Leonardo Da Vinci; and in the second place, which really should be the first place, Ben’s creative mind never rests and the Renaissance, which means “the rebirth” was one of the greatest creative epochs the world has ever experienced.

There isn’t anything Ben can’t master. He is a superlative chef and when living in Los Angeles he did the cooking at swank soirees for some of filmdom’s famous names. He worked for years in the family bakery and treating dough as something to sculpt, turned out impressive pastries, breads and wedding cakes. When he moved into his Ojai house he had a hand in all aspects of its remodeling and decorating and continued the process in the backyard and garden.

Obviously he thought a yard, at least his, wouldn’t be complete without a custom-made cob pizza oven. Consequently, he built one. It is the type of oven built in biblical times with clay, straw, sand and water with a brick floor and is fired not with gas but with wooden logs. At a recent gathering he turned out a substantial variety of pizzas topped with all manner of delicacies at the rate of one every four minutes or so. I don’t have whatever it takes to be regarded as a pizza connoisseur (or a connoisseur of anything for that matter). I’m more of a pizza glutton, and having never met a pizza I didn’t like, I am unable to render an authoritative review on the DiGregorio pizza. But I will swear on all that is holy that I never tasted such delectable pizzas as those Ben made that afternoon.

Maybe it’s the fact it went from oven to mouth in a few seconds; maybe it was so tasty because it was cooked in a wood-burning, old-fashioned, clay, handmade oven; perhaps the secret ingredient was Ben’s magic touch.

Whatever Ben undertakes, the end result, to use an overworked adjective, is “awesome.” And were he to have done all this “stuff” 600 years ago in Italy he would be remembered just as we remember Michelangelo, Dante, Botticelli, and Galileo. Although Ben’s pizzas do not leave the premises, one can access his other goodies at his website: http://www.icookyoueatojai.com.

Ben’s son Paolo (a restaurant executive chef in Seattle) assists Ben with cob oven pizza-making. Photo: Richard Shirley