Exactly How Do Wood Fired Pizza Ovens Work?

You’ve noticed wood-fired ovens whilst reveling in your vacations in Europe and you may even enjoy the food theatre that cooking with a hardwood oven creates in your local pizzeria,but how does a hardwood fired pizza oven work? Talk to us at commercial wood ovens

Pizza ovens operate on the basis of applying three forms of heat 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 from the normal air

Grilling with a wood-fired pizza oven is really much simpler than you may imagine. All you really need to do is to ignite a great fire in the centre of the oven and then let it to heat up 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 let food to cook.

Once you have your oven dome and floor up to temperature,you merely push the fire to one side,applying a metal peel,and start to cook,applying real 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 real wood is the equivalent of whacking up the temperature dial. If you don’t feed the fire,you let the temperature 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 make use of one other 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 let the temperature to go down to that which you need,or As an alternative,you could just bring the oven up to the required temperature by applying less real wood.

As you are applying convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as crucial 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 make use of tin foil,to reflect some of the heat away.

Heat generated within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is constructed of refractory brick and has good 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 up adequately. 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.

An additional thing to watch is,if the floor of the oven isn’t storing heat,you may need to reheat if 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 craftsmens,like a Valoriani.

So,taking that into consideration,we’re going to change the title of this blog. The guidance above isn’t so much about how real wood fired pizza ovens operate,but how the best wood-fired ovens operate. If you go through a few ovens before steering a course towards a  commercial wood ovens , that’s something you’ll come to appreciate.

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