You’ve seen wood-fired ovens whilst appreciating your trips in Europe and you may even appreciate the food theatre that grilling with a solid 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 making use of three forms of heat energy 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 turned white and is soot-free
3. Convected heat,which comes up from the floor and from the ambient air
Cooking with a wood-fired pizza oven is in reality much simpler than you may believe. All you really need to do is to ignite an excellent 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 allow food to cook.
Once you have your oven dome and floor up to temp,you simply push the fire to one side,employing a metal peel,and start to cook,utilizing raw 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 fire wood is the equivalent of whacking up the temperature dial. If you don’t feed the fire,you allow 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 temperature of around 400-450 C; if you wish to choose one other cooking food 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 allow the temperature to go down to that which you need,or As an alternative,you could just bring the oven up to the needed temperature by utilizing less raw wood.
As you are applying 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 make use of tin foil,to reflect some of the heat away.
Heat produced 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 best 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 effect.
Some ovens may require you to leave cinders 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 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 real wood fired pizza ovens operate,but how the best wood-fired ovens function. If you go through a few ovens before steering a course towards a -,that’s something you’ll come to appreciate.