You’ve discovered wood-fired ovens whilst appreciating your trips in Europe and you may even appreciate the food theatre that cooking with a real wood oven creates in your nearby pizzeria,but how does a real wood fired pizza oven function? Talk to us at commercial wood ovens
Pizza ovens operate on the basis of making use of three kinds 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 background air
Grilling with a wood-fired pizza oven is essentially much simpler than you may imagine. All you really need to do is to light an excellent 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 generate 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 temp,you simply push the fire to one side,employing a metal peel,and start to cook,using 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 real wood is the equivalent of whacking up the temp dial. If you don’t feed the fire,you allow the temp to drop.
How hot you allow 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 use one other grilling 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 get the oven up to 450 ° C and then let the temp to drop to that which you require,or Alternatively,you could just bring the oven up to the required temperature by using less fire wood.
As you are employing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as important to get the stones as hot. One other way to impact the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to choose tin foil,to reflect some of the heat away.
Heat created within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is made 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 impact.
Some ovens may require you to leave ashes on the oven floor,to try to heat it up 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.
An additional thing to watch is,if the floor of the oven isn’t storing heat,you may need to reheat if before grilling 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. commercial wood 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 raw wood fired pizza ovens work,but how the best wood-fired ovens function. If you go through a few ovens before steering a course towards a wood fired pizza ovens,that’s something you’ll come to appreciate.