You’ve discovered wood-fired ovens whilst reveling in your travels in Europe and you may even enjoy the food theatre that grilling with a hardwood oven creates in your neighborhood pizzeria,but how does a solid wood fired pizza oven work? Talk to us at -
Pizza ovens operate on the basis of choosing three kinds of heat for cooking food:
1. Direct heat from the combustion and flames
2. Radiated heat coming down from the dome,which is at its best when the fire has burned for a while until the dome has turned white and is soot-free
3. Convected heat,which comes up from the floor and from the background air
Cooking with a wood-fired pizza oven is essentially much simpler than you may believe. All you really need to do is to light a really good fire in the middle of the oven and then allow it to heat up both the hearth of the oven and the inner dome. The heat you produce from your fire will be absorbed by the oven and that heat will then be radiated or convected,to allow food to cook.
Once you have your oven dome and floor up to temperature,you merely push the fire to one side,using a metal peel,and start to cook,using solid wood as the heat source,rather than the gas or electricity you may usually rely on.
Of course,there are no temp dials or controls,other than the fire,so the addition of timber is the equivalent of whacking up the temperature dial. If you don’t feed the fire,you allow the temperature to drop.
How hot you let your oven to become really depends on what you wish to cook in your wood-fired oven. For pizza,you need a temperature of around 400-450 ° C; if you wish to make use of another cooking technique,such as roasting,you need to do that at a temperature of around 200-300 ° C. There are different ways to do this.
You could first off get the oven up to 450 ° C and then let the temp to go down to that which you require,or Alternatively,you could just bring the oven up to the needed temp by applying less raw wood.
As you are employing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as essential to get the stones as hot. An additional way to have an effect on the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to use tin foil,to reflect some of the heat away.
Heat developed within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is constructed of refractory brick and has good insulation. To cook the best pizza,you need to have an even temperature in your oven,both top and bottom. The design of the Valoriani makes this easy,but this is also an area where the quality of the oven will have a big impact.
Some ovens may need you to leave embers on the oven floor,to try to heat it up adequately. Others have minimal or no insulation,so you will have to feed the fire much more. But that means it will then have too much direct heat and won’t cook top and bottom evenly.
One other thing to watch is,if the floor of the oven isn’t storing heat,you may need to reheat if before grilling every single pizza– a real pain. The message here is to always look for an oven built from the very best refractory materials and designed by masters, like a Valoriani. -
So,taking that into consideration,we’re going to change the title of this blog. The advice above isn’t so much about how real wood fired pizza ovens work,but how the best wood-fired ovens work. If you go through a few ovens before steering a course towards a -,that’s something you’ll come to appreciate.