Ira Nevin, 85, pioneered the modern gas-burning pizza oven at the close of World War II. These mass-produced metal ovens displaced the brick ovens that Nevin built in his youth and helped turn pizza into a major industry.
Now, increasingly sophisticated pizza has fueled a new demand for the old-fashioned taste imparted by wood-burning ovens. Nevin has gone back to the future to keep up. His Il Forno Classico is a gas-fired oven that Nevin says looks like a wood-burning oven and bakes as well - but without the ashes, smoke and fire-tending labor.Nevin, a third-generation oven-builder, wrote his thesis in engineering school on oven construction. He left ovens behind for a career as an aircraft engineer, which included designing engines for the B-29 bomber.
He began thinking about ovens again near the end of the war at the request of an Italian baker whose gas appliance could not reach the necessary high temperatures for pizza. As a result, Nevin developed and sold a high-temperature gas oven, but, he says, he neglected to take out a patent and a copycat competitor nearly put him out of business.
"I was sick with jealousy and hate for about two weeks," he said. "Then my wife shoved me in the ribs and said, `Go do something about it.' So I redesigned the oven." That design helped build Nevin's company, Bakers Pride, in New Rochelle into one of the largest in the industry.
Nevin says the secret of his new oven, developed in late 1992, is a booster burner inside the baking chamber that simulates the effect of a wood oven's flame. In a wood oven, the fire burns on one side of the dome-shaped baking chamber while food cooks on the other. Il Forno Classico duplicates this intense, direct heat and its fast, crisp baking.
Nevin's new ovens are in restaurants across the country. Ciro Verde, a pizza chef in New York, uses one at Mad. 61, and a wood oven at Le Madri. As for copycats, Nevin said, "We have a patent on Il Forno Classico. I won't let that happen again."