VIDEO: You've never tasted pizza like they make in Richards Landing!

Great pizza, according to the Diluzios of Richards Landing, begins with the godfather of pizza flours: the finely ground, low-gluten '00' flour milled by the Caputo family of Naples, Italy.

Caputo doppio-zero flour has just enough stretch, but not too much, to make a crust that's thinner in the middle with a perfectly ballooned rim.

To get the blistered, crunchy bottoms that world-class pizzaioli strive for, you also need a hot oven.

Hot, as in Dante's Inferno hot.

900 degrees Fahrenheit hot.

Three years ago, John Diluzio started researching wood-fired, domed brick ovens unearthed in the ruins of ancient Pompeii.

"It's not just a style," he tells SooToday. "The dome captures the heat in a way that other ovens are not capable of, because the dome is higher. The entrance is much lower, so the dome retains the heat."

Diluzio, a retired director of finance and administration and acting president at Algoma University and former property development coordinator at the City of Sault Ste. Marie, had never laid a brick in his life.

But last year, he spent the entire cottage season, more than 500 hours, building his own Pompeii pizza oven.

"Late spring, all summer, and a good part of the fall. It usurped my entire cottage season."

Diluzio's oven has not one, but two brick domes.

The inner dome, in which the pizza is baked, is made of fire brick and refractory mortar from the steel mill.

"To keep the heat in, there's a five-inch space all around that with heat-resistant insulation, and then the outside decorative brick dome."

The Diluzio oven also has a smoker unit underneath.

"That's a wood-burning unit that's interconnected with the pizza oven," he says.

"The purpose of that is to have a fire going steady at a more moderate temperature of 300, 400 or 500 degrees. That bottom burner is interconnected with clay flue pipes into the back of the pizza oven."

"You just remove a brick, and it sends heat into the pizza oven, and the pizza oven doubles for roasting porchetta, ribs, turkey, whatever you want to roast with slow, continuous heat."

All of the material used to build the oven was sourced locally, much of it from a quarry at Fifth Line and Old Goulais Bay Road that stores demolished brick from local buildings.

There, Diluzio found the 100-year-old clay bricks from Sault Collegiate Institute that he used to construct the outer dome.

The SCI bricks were actually manufactured here, at Stanley and Thomas Elliott's brick kilns on Rossmore Avenue just west of Peoples Road.

The refractory brick used in making the inner dome was "surplus inventory that Algoma Steel didn't want," Diluzio says.

"They sent it to the quarry in the pit as excess material. The bricks were there for a long period of time. It just happened coincidentally to my benefit, that I needed them and he made them available to me, all at very, very little, if any cost at all."

This summer, John, wife and master pizzaiolo Katherine and other Diluzio family members have been fine-tuning the new oven and turning out mind-blowing pizzas by the dozen.

Given their proven business and pizza-making acumen, are the Diluzios ready to give St. Joseph Island an awesome new pizza joint?

"Friends and neighbours are welcome to participate," John says.

"We always have 12 to 14 or more people here on any given weekend. If some more want to join us, they're more than welcome."

"But we're not having a commercial entity of any kind."