This company makes pizza oven portable and can be taken away

SUZUKA, Mie-have pizza oven, will travel, not a phrase you hear often, since proper pizza ovens are nearly by definition stationary. Nearly, but not entirely. A masonry company in this west Japan city has created a genuine outdoor pizza oven that can be taken apart, hauled off to some other scenic outdoor spot, and remounted.

The masonry firm Miyazaki-sekizai Co. Ltd. has been in business for more than 120 years, with most of its sales coming from stone grave markers. As the coronaviruses gripped Japan and more people began turning to the outdoors for fun, the firm decided it was time for a new flagship product to fit the new normal.

As they soak in extraordinary moments at camp sites and places like that, I hope people will enjoy some delicious pizza, says fifth-generation company president Ryota Miyazaki, 33, of the new oven.

Many families can no longer care for the graves of previous generations because of Japan's low birth rate and aging population, and some decided to take down the gravestones permanently, according to Miyazaki. This and other factors mean that orders for new stones have been in decline for a long time.

Miyazaki was concerned that there wasn't something else his company could make with stone, and to focus on the coronaviruses-era outdoor boom. He decided to make a stone pizza oven compact enough that you could put it in the trunk of your car and take it places, and spent about five months and endless trials and error before coming up with the final design around late 2020.

The ovens are built from Oya tuff stone, an especially heat-resistant stone that is found in distant Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture. Each oven is 42 centimeters wide, 87 cm deep, and 42 cm tall. They weigh about 140 kilograms in total but they break down into 13 parts, which takes a person about 10 minutes to put together. It's easy to store and can be set up in the yard of a regular house.

To make sure the outdoor chef doesn't have to open the oven and reduce the interior temperature to check on the pizza's progress, it has a heat-resistant glass door and a handle that turns an internal table to ensure even cooking.

Miyazaki declares that you can even make a frozen pizza taste like the real thing with super crispy crust. The oven isn't limited to pizza. It has far infrared effects that bring out the sweetness of potatoes, onions and other vegetables, while also leaving meat wonderfully tender.

Miyazaki boasts that it enlivens all that's best about the ingredients.

The ovens will be built to order this summer, with each unit expected to cost about 300,000 yen approx. They aren't cheap, but I hope people have fun cooking with a stone oven and enjoying the process of putting it together, Miyazaki said.

Inquiries can be made at the Miyazaki-sekizai head office in Suzuka, Mie Prefecture, at 0120 - 820 - 743 in Japanese.