You’ve noticed wood-fired ovens whilst appreciating your vacations in Europe and you may even appreciate the food theatre that cooking food with a hardwood oven creates in your local pizzeria,but how does a real wood fired pizza oven work? Talk to us at -
Pizza ovens operate on the basis of using three kinds of heat for grilling:
1. Direct heat from the fire 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
Grilling with a wood-fired pizza oven is in reality much simpler than you may imagine. All you really need to do is to ignite a fantastic 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 temperature,you merely push the fire to one side,utilizing a metal peel,and start to cook,making use of 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 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 use one more cooking food 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 initially get the oven up to 450 ° C and then allow the temp to drop to that which you need,or As an alternative,you could just bring the oven up to the required temp by choosing less timber.
As you are applying convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as important to get the stones as hot. Another way to influence the Amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to choose tin foil,to reflect some of the heat away.
Heat generated within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is built 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 adequately. 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 other 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 artisans, 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 fire wood fired pizza ovens work,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.