Educational Pizza

Fun Learning Opportunities with New Roots to Harvest Oven

Pizza plus learning is pretty much a perfect match, so Roots to Harvest has tapped into young peoples’ love of the ‘za by creating educational programs around preparing and baking pizzas from scratch. Last fall, as schools navigated learning during a pandemic, Roots to Harvest switched its regular indoor programs to a portable outdoor kitchen, complete with a wood-fired pizza oven, that they brought to local schools with Lakehead Public Schools and regional First Nations. Students learned how to make tomato sauce, squish and stretch dough, and practice their organizational, chopping, and measuring skills, all in an outdoor kitchen classroom.

Roots to Harvest hopes to continue bringing the portable kitchen to schools and community groups this year. And now, students of all ages can use the new wood-fired bake oven at Roots to Harvest’s Fort William Road location. Youth, staff, and volunteers prepped the site in their green backyard oasis last summer. Then, Derek Lucchese of Both Hands Wood-Fired Pizzeria & Bakery, a skilled bake oven maker, built the oven with fireproof brick, and trained Roots staff on how to operate and maintain it. “It’s like a dream come true,” says Kim McGibbon, the food and kitchen director at Roots. When COVID restrictions loosened in summer 2021, Roots was able to start hosting its first groups, including Science North day programs for kids in grades seven to nine and a wellness culture group for Indigenous youth in grade nine in the Thunder Bay Catholic District School board. The reaction: “This is the best pizza I’ve ever had!”

The best-ever pizza starts with the bake oven getting fired up the day before, then sealed overnight. In the morning, the internal temperature is still about 400°F, and it doesn’t take long to reach 700°F again with a small amount of wood. This high heat means that the customized pizzas cook in less than three minutes, with plenty of flavour and crisp, bubbly dough (staff are the ones handling the hot stuff, of course). The next day, the oven is still hot enough to easily cook bread, vegetables, and meat for even more meals. In addition to the skills that the youth learn with the portable kitchen, this site has plenty of flowers as well as bee hives, so they get to see how honey hives work, talk about the importance of pollinators, and get an appreciation for fresh, local food, says McGibbon. The pizza dough is made with Brule Creek flour and the toppings and sauce are made, when possible, with local produce from Roots’s gardens, pantry, and freezer.

The kids don’t get to have all the fun with the bake oven. Going forward, Roots will also host “cooking for credit” for adult learners for a high school credit, and plan to offer focaccia-making classes for the city’s Culture Days at the end of September. As well, they’ll bake buns and pastries for the hot meals served at Dew Drop Inn.

“It’s really fun to watch [people] explore, and try new skills and also new foods in a fun, relaxed kind of way,” says McGibbon. “That’s what we try to do here.”