jim skutt's Page

After working ten years at a bakery, during which I developed a small woodfired bread trade, I found myself wanting to continue the making of pizza in a setting which served the needs of not only a community of people who already knew one another, but also those who they do not yet know. There's an extraordinary magic that happens with people when they're eating and celebrating together. Musical instruments start coming out of cases, home recipes are swapped, and wine bottles are uncorked and passed around.

The actual trailer was procured in 1992. I got a truck from a neighbor for $150. At the time I had been in close contact with Alan Scott. I had helped him with some very exciting brick oven builds in San Francisco and Napa Valley, and during these times I talked over with him the possibility of putting an oven on a trailer and using it to go to events and parties and make pizza for people.

I loaded up my two sons, we hitched up the trailer and drove down to California. We stayed at Alan's house. I went out and bought materials and built an oven right on the trailer. About a week's project. We drove back up north and began assembling our mobile kitchen. We actually built a little house over and around the oven and the first event we took it to was over the mountains in Eastern Washington.

Since that first summer and fall of '92, the oven has been active throughout, and today it is a busy enterprise, with events in the spring, summer, and fall seasons and plenty of parties and catering in between. Last summer the oven was active for eight consecutive weekends, and produced more than 3,000 pounds of pizza dough.

We're starting to work on our 2009 schedule. We know we'll be at the Reggae Festival in Oregon again (August), we know we'll be at Barter Faire again in October, we know there's a good chance of being at some big festivals, we'll see... I will publish an update here as it gets firmed up. If anyone out there knows of a good festival up here in the Pack Northwest we could or should attend, let me know..

Thanks for reading through all this. I'll get some photos up soon.