You’ve discovered wood-fired ovens whilst indulging in your travels in Europe and you may even enjoy the food theatre that grilling with a timber oven creates in your nearby pizzeria,but how does a timber fired pizza oven work? Talk to us at commercial wood ovens
Pizza ovens operate on the basis of utilizing three forms of heat energy for grilling:
- 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
Cooking 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 middle of the oven and then allow it to heat up both the hearth of the oven and the inner dome. The heat you develop 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 temp,you just push the fire to one side,utilizing a metal peel,and start to cook,utilizing solid wood 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 solid 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 temp of around 400-450 ° C; if you wish to make use of another grilling 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 primarily get the oven up to 450 ° C and then allow the temp to go down to that which you need,or As an alternative,you could just bring the oven up to the needed temp by utilizing less solid wood.
As you are utilizing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as essential to get the stones as hot. One more way to have an effect on 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 produced within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is constructed of refractory brick and has fantastic insulation. To cook the best 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 need you to leave cinders on the oven floor,to try to heat it up 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 if before grilling 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 masters, like a Valoriani. commercial wood ovens
So,taking that into account,we’re going to change the title of this blog. The guidance above isn’t so much about how solid wood fired pizza ovens work,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.