You’ve experienced wood-fired ovens whilst revelling in your travels in Europe and you may even indulge in the food theatre that cooking food with a raw wood oven creates in your local pizzeria, but how does a solid wood fired pizza oven work? Talk to us at Valoriani commercial wood fired ovens
Pizza ovens operate on the foundation of applying three forms of heat 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 the background air
Cooking food with a wood-fired pizza oven is much simpler than you may imagine. All you need to do is to light a fantastic fire in the centre of the oven and then allow it to heat 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 the food 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, utilizing hardwood 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 hardwood 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 employ another 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 initially get the oven up to 450 ° C and then allow the temperature to drop to that which you need, or As an alternative, you could just bring the oven up to the needed temperature by using less firewood.
As you are utilizing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting, it is not as essential to get the stones as hot. An additional way to impact the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to employ 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 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 effect.
Some ovens may need you to leave cinders 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.
One other thing to watch is, if the floor of the oven isn’t storing heat, you may need to reheat it 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 artisans, like a Valoriani oven
So, considering that we’re going to change the title of this blog. The advice above isn’t so much about how real wood fired pizza ovens operate, but how the best wood-fired ovens function.