You’ve noticed wood-fired ovens whilst relishing your travels in Europe and you may even relish the food theatre that grilling with a wood oven creates in your neighbourhood pizzeria, but how does a raw wood fired pizza oven function? Talk to us at Valoriani commercial wood fired ovens
Pizza ovens operate based on 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 turned white and is soot-free
3. Convected heat, which comes up from the floor and the normal air
Cooking with a wood-fired pizza oven is much simpler than you may imagine. All you need to do is to ignite a fantastic fire in the centre of the oven and then allow it to heat both the heart of the oven and the inner dome. The heat you generate from your fire will be absorbed by the oven and that heat will then be radiated or convected, to let the food cook.
Once you have your oven dome and floor up to temperature, you merely push the fire to one side, making use of a metal peel, and start to cook, applying timber 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 timber is the equivalent of whacking up the temperature dial. If you don’t feed the fire, you allow the temp to drop.
How hot you allow your oven to become 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 utilize an additional cooking food 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 get the oven up to 450 ° C and then let the temp fall to that which you require, or As an alternative, you could just bring the oven up to the required temp by utilizing less solid wood.
As you are utilizing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting, it is not as important to get the stones as hot. An additional way to influence the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to make use of tin foil, to reflect some of the heat away.
The heat created within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained if your oven is constructed of refractory brick and has great 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 impact.
Some ovens may need you to leave embers on the oven floor, to try to heat it 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.
Another thing to watch is, if the floor of the oven isn’t storing heat, you may need to reheat it before cooking food 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 oven
So, considering that we’re going to change the title of this blog. The guidance above isn’t so much about how hardwood-fired pizza ovens work, but how the best wood-fired ovens function.
