You’ve spotted wood-fired ovens whilst relishing your trips in Europe and you may even indulge in the food theatre that cooking food with a hardwood oven creates in your local pizzeria, but how does a wood fired pizza oven function? Talk to us at Valoriani about commercial wood fired ovens
Pizza ovens operate on the foundation of employing three types 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 the ambient air
Grilling with a wood-fired pizza oven is in reality much simpler than you may believe. All you need to do is to light a fantastic fire in the centre of the oven and then allow it to heat both the hearth of the oven and the inner dome. The heat you produce 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 just push the fire to one side, utilizing a metal peel, and start to cook, employing 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 solid 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 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 utilize another 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 temperature go down to that which you require, or As an alternative, you could just bring the oven up to the required temperature by making use of less real wood.
As you are making use of convected rather than radiated heat for roasting, it is not as essential to get the stones as hot. Another way to affect the amount of heat reaching the food in a very hot oven is to use tin foil, to reflect some of the heat away.
The heat produced within a wood-fired oven should be well-retained if your oven is built of refractory brick and has great insulation. To cook the perfect pizza, you need to have an even temperature 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 require you to leave embers on the oven floor, to try to heat it adequately. 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.
One more thing to watch is, if the floor of the oven isn’t storing heat, you may need to reheat it 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 artisans, like a Valoriani oven.
So, taking that into account, 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.