You’ve experienced wood-fired ovens whilst relishing your travels in Europe and you may even appreciate the food theatre that cooking food with a timber oven creates in your nearby pizzeria, but how does a real wood fired pizza oven function? Talk to us at Valoriani oven
Pizza ovens operate on the foundation of choosing three forms of heat energy for cooking:
- 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 turned 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 in reality much simpler than you may believe. All you need to do is to light an excellent fire in the middle of the oven and then let it 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 just push the fire to one side, using a metal peel, and start to cook, choosing wood 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 let 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 temp of around 400-450 ° C; if you wish to utilize one more cooking 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 off 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 required temperature by employing less wood.
As you are choosing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting, it is not as essential to get the stones as hot. One more way to alter the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to use tin foil, to reflect some of the heat away.
The heat developed within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained if your oven is made of refractory brick and has excellent insulation. To cook the perfect pizza, you need to have an even temp in your oven, both top and bottom. The style 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 ashes on the oven floor, to try to heat it 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.
One other 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 pain. The message here is to always look for an oven built from the very best refractory materials and designed by masters, like a Valoriani commercial wood fired ovens
So, taking that into account, 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 function.