You’ve observed wood-fired ovens whilst appreciating your vacations in Europe and you may even relish the food theatre that grilling with a fire wood oven creates in your neighborhood pizzeria,but how does a fire wood fired pizza oven work? Talk to us at -
Pizza ovens operate on the basis 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 normal air
Cooking food 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 centre 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,utilizing a metal peel,and start to cook,employing solid 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 raw wood is the equivalent of whacking up the temp dial. If you don’t feed the fire,you allow the temp 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 make use of an additional grilling 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 initially get the oven up to 450 C and then let the temperature to drop to that which you need,or Alternatively,you could just bring the oven up to the required temp by applying less wood.
As you are making use of convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as crucial to get the stones as hot. One more way to alter the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to utilize tin foil,to reflect some of the heat away.
Heat created within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is made of refractory brick and has excellent insulation. To cook the perfect pizza,you need to have an even temp 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 need you to leave embers on the oven floor,to try to heat it up sufficiently. 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 more thing to watch is,if the floor of the oven isn’t storing heat,you may need to reheat if before cooking food 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 craftsmens,like a Valoriani. -
So,taking that into account,we’re going to change the title of this blog. The advice above isn’t so much about how real wood fired pizza ovens function,but how the best wood-fired ovens operate. If you go through a few ovens before steering a course towards a -,that’s something you’ll come to appreciate.