You’ve noticed wood-fired ovens whilst indulging in your travels in Europe and you may even relish the food theatre that cooking with a timber oven creates in your local pizzeria, but how does a real wood fired pizza oven function? Talk to us at Valoriani oven
Pizza ovens operate on the foundation of utilizing three kinds of heat energy for cooking food:
- Direct heat from the combustion and flames
- 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
- Convected heat, which comes up from the floor and the normal air
Grilling with a wood-fired pizza oven is much simpler than you may believe. All you need to do is to light a very good fire in the centre of the oven and then let it heat both the hearth of the oven and the inner dome. The heat you create from your fire will be absorbed by the oven and that heat will then be radiated or convected, to allow food to cook.
Once you have your oven dome and floor up to temperature, you merely push the fire to one side, using a metal peel, and start to cook, applying hardwood 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 real wood 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 temp of around 400-450 ° C; if you wish to use 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 initially get the oven up to 450 ° C and then allow the temperature to fall to that which you need, or As an alternative, you could just bring the oven up to the required temp by making use of less real wood.
As you are utilizing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting, it is not as important to get the stones as hot. One other way to affect the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to choose tin foil, to reflect some of the heat away.
The heat generated within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained if your oven is made of refractory brick and has really 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 require you to leave ashes 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 more 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 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 wood fired pizza ovens operate, but how the best wood-fired ovens function.
