ou’ve experienced wood-fired ovens whilst appreciating your trips in Europe and you may even appreciate the food theatre that cooking food with a wood oven creates in your nearby pizzeria,but how does a wood fired pizza oven work?
Pizza ovens operate on the basis of employing three types of heat energy for cooking food:
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 from the ambient air
Grilling with a wood-fired pizza oven is actually much simpler than you may realize. All you really need to do is to ignite a great fire in the middle 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 just push the fire to one side,employing a metal peel,and start to cook,employing fire 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 fire wood is the equivalent of whacking up the temp dial. If you don’t feed the fire,you let the temp 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 temp of around 400-450 ° C; if you wish to choose one other 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 primarily get the oven up to 450 ° C and then let the temp to drop to that which you need,or Alternatively,you could just bring the oven up to the needed temp by employing 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. Another 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 developed within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained,if your oven is made 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 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 embers 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.
Another thing to watch is,if the floor of the oven isn’t storing heat,you may need to reheat if before cooking food 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.