Aug 27, 2023
How Do Wood Fired Pizza Ovens Work?
You’ve discovered wood-fired ovens whilst indulging in your travels in Europe and you may even enjoy the food theatre that cooking food with a fire wood oven creates in your local pizzeria,but how does a solid wood fired pizza oven function? Talk to us at -
Pizza ovens operate on the foundation of employing three forms of heat for cooking:
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 changed white and is soot-free
3. Convected heat,which comes up from the floor and from the background air
Cooking food with a wood-fired pizza oven is really much simpler than you may believe. All you really need to do is to ignite 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 develop 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 temp,you just push the fire to one side,applying a metal peel,and start to cook,choosing fire wood as the heat source,rather than the gas or electricity you may usually rely on.
Of course,there are no temperature dials or controls,other than the fire,so the addition of solid wood is the equivalent of whacking up the temp dial. If you don’t feed the fire,you allow the temperature to drop.
How hot you allow your oven to become really depends on what you wish to cook in your wood-fired oven. For pizza,you need a temp of around 400-450 ° C; if you wish to utilize one other cooking technique,such as roasting,you need to do that at a temp of around 200-300 ° C. There are different ways to do this.
You could first get the oven up to 450 ° C and then let the temperature to go down to that which you require,or Alternatively,you could just bring the oven up to the needed temp by utilizing less timber.
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 influence the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to make use of tin foil,to reflect some of the heat away.
Heat developed within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is built of refractory brick and has very good insulation. To cook the perfect pizza,you need to have an even temperature in your oven,both top and bottom. The style 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 require you to leave embers on the oven floor,to try to heat it up sufficiently. Others have little 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 more 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 account,we’re going to change the title of this blog. The guidance above isn’t so much about how wood fired pizza ovens function,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.
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