You`ve experienced wood-fired ovens whilst enjoying your vacations in Europe and you may even relish the food theatre that cooking food with a raw wood oven creates in your local pizzeria,but how does a raw wood fired pizza oven function? Talk to us at commercial wood ovens

Pizza ovens operate on the foundation of utilizing 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 ambient air

Cooking food with a wood-fired pizza oven is essentially much simpler than you may realize. All you really need to do is to ignite a great fire in the centre 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 temperature,you simply 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 temperature dials or controls,other than the fire,so the addition of solid wood is the equivalent of whacking up the temperature dial. If you don`t feed the fire,you allow the temperature 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 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 first off get the oven up to 450 ° C and then allow the temperature to drop to that which you need,or Alternatively,you could just bring the oven up to the needed temperature by utilizing less solid wood.

As you are utilizing convected rather than radiated heat for roasting,it is not as important 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 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 built of refractory brick and has fantastic 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 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 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 artisans,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 solid 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.