You’ve observed wood-fired ovens whilst indulging in your travels in Europe and you may even revel in the food theatre that cooking with a timber oven creates in your nearby pizzeria,but how does a real wood fired pizza oven function? Talk to us at wood fired pizza ovens
Pizza ovens operate on the basis of utilizing three types of heat energy for grilling:
- 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
Grilling with a wood-fired pizza oven is in reality much simpler than you may think. All you really need to do is to ignite a very good 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 develop 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,making use of 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 temp dials or controls,other than the fire,so the addition of solid 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 temperature of around 400-450 ° C; if you wish to apply an additional grilling 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 first get the oven up to 450 ° C and then allow the temperature to drop to that which you require,or As an alternative,you could just bring the oven up to the needed temp by employing less solid wood.
As you are employing 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 created within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is constructed of refractory brick and has fantastic insulation. To cook the best pizza,you need to have an even temperature 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 impact.
Some ovens may need 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.
Another 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 craftsmens, like a Valoriani. wood fired pizza ovens
So,taking that into consideration,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 work. If you go through a few ovens before steering a course towards a wood fired pizza ovens,that’s something you’ll come to appreciate.