Forging a love for outdoor cooking comes from a connection with your environment, equipment, and ingredients. Chef, award-winning author, food writer, and Friend of Ooni Gill Meller employs these three tenets with this earthy mushroom, asparagus, and thyme pizza, cooked with his Ooni Karu 16, in the green forests surrounding his Dorset home. 

Sourcing good-quality (or even better, foraged) ingredients like fresh, earthy asparagus spears and wild chestnut mushrooms is key to the delicate balance of flavours in this pizza (if you can’t find chestnut mushrooms, buttons will do too). Tender onions, plucked thyme leaves, and a crack of black pepper finish this pizza off. And while Gill enjoys a wood-fired technique, this pizza is just as delicious cooked with either gas or coal.

If you’re interested to learn more about Gill’s approach to using plants in everyday cooking, check out his latest cookbook, Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower,