Exactly How Do Wood Fired Pizza Ovens Work?Exactly How Do Wood Fired Pizza Ovens Work?
ou’ve discovered wood-fired ovens whilst appreciating your travels in Europe and you may even appreciate the food theatre that grilling with a hardwood oven creates in your neighborhood pizzeria,but how does a hardwood fired pizza oven work? Talk to us at wood fired pizza ovens
Pizza ovens operate on the basis of choosing three forms 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 normal air
Cooking food with a wood-fired pizza oven is really much simpler than you may realize. 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 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,choosing a metal peel,and start to cook,choosing raw 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 raw 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 apply 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 temp to go down to that which you require,or As an alternative,you could just bring the oven up to the needed temp by choosing less raw wood.
As you are choosing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as important to get the stones as hot. Another way to affect the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to apply tin foil,to reflect some of the heat away.
Heat generated within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is made of refractory brick and has great 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 impact.
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.
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 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 raw wood fired pizza ovens function,but how the best wood-fired ovens function. 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.