Exactly How Do Wood Fired Pizza Ovens Work?
You’ve discovered wood-fired ovens whilst reveling in your vacations in Europe and you may even enjoy the food theatre that cooking with a fire wood oven creates in your local pizzeria,but how does a timber fired pizza oven work? Talk to us at wood fired pizza ovens
Pizza ovens operate on the basis of employing three types of heat energy for cooking food:
- 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 from the ambient air
Grilling with a wood-fired pizza oven is essentially much simpler than you may imagine. All you really need to do is to ignite a fantastic fire in the centre of the oven and then allow 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 temperature,you just push the fire to one side,applying a metal peel,and start to cook,choosing timber 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 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 temperature of around 400-450 ° C; if you wish to choose one more 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 allow the temp to fall to that which you require,or As an alternative,you could just bring the oven up to the needed temperature by choosing less wood.
As you are employing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as crucial to get the stones as hot. One more way to affect the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to use tin foil,to reflect some of the heat away.
Heat developed within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is built of refractory brick and has good 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 need you to leave cinders on the oven floor,to try to heat it up adequately. 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 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 artisans, like a Valoriani. commercial wood ovens
So,taking that into consideration,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 work. If you go through a few ovens before steering a course towards a commercial wood ovens,that’s something you’ll come to appreciate.