How Do Wood Fired Pizza Ovens Work?How Do Wood Fired Pizza Ovens Work?
You’ve noticed wood-fired ovens whilst enjoying your travels in Europe and you may even enjoy the food theatre that cooking with a real wood oven creates in your local pizzeria,but how does a real wood fired pizza oven function? Talk to us at -
Pizza ovens operate on the basis of choosing three types 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 ambient air
Cooking food with a wood-fired pizza oven is essentially much simpler than you may imagine. All you really need to do is to ignite a great fire in the centre of the oven and then let 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 let food to cook.
Once you have your oven dome and floor up to temp,you merely push the fire to one side,choosing a metal peel,and start to cook,choosing timber 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 temp dial. If you don’t feed the fire,you let the temp 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 temp of around 400-450 ° C; if you wish to employ an additional 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 primarily get the oven up to 450 ° C and then let the temp to fall to that which you need,or Alternatively,you could just bring the oven up to the required temp by choosing less timber.
As you are choosing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as crucial to get the stones as hot. Another way to alter the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to employ tin foil,to reflect some of the heat away.
Heat generated within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is made of refractory brick and has really good insulation. To cook the best pizza,you need to have an even temp 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 effect.
Some ovens may need you to leave ashes 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.
Another thing to watch is,if the floor of the oven isn’t storing heat,you may need to reheat if before cooking every single pizza– a real irritation. The message here is to always look for an oven built from the very best refractory materials and designed by artisans,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 timber 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.