You’ve discovered wood-fired ovens whilst enjoying your travels in Europe and you may even appreciate the food theatre that cooking with a raw wood oven creates in your local pizzeria,but how does a raw wood fired pizza oven function? Talk to us atWood Fired Pizza Ovens
Pizza ovens operate on the foundation of using 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 changed white and is soot-free
3. Convected heat,which comes up from the floor and from the normal air
Cooking with a wood-fired pizza oven is in reality much simpler than you may imagine. All you really need to do is to light 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 let food to cook.
Once you have your oven dome and floor up to temp,you just push the fire to one side,using a metal peel,and start to cook,using real wood 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 real wood 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 choose 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 off get the oven up to 450 ° C and then let the temp to drop to that which you require,or Alternatively,you could just bring the oven up to the needed temp by using less real wood.
As you are using convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as essential to get the stones as hot. An additional way to alter 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 fantastic insulation. To cook the perfect 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 require you to leave cinders on the oven floor,to try to heat it up sufficiently. Others have very 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.
An additional 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 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 real wood fired pizza ovens operate,but how the best wood-fired ovens operate. If you go through a few ovens before steering a course towards a Valoriani,that’s something you’ll come to appreciate.