FAQ
What is a wood burning oven?
A wood burning pizza/bread oven is an oven made out of clay adobe, refractory fire bricks or refractory concrete (heat resistant mix made from ingredients that can withstand prolonged high heat conditions). Traditionally, ovens were made using material that wasn't costly and was easy to obtain in nature. Nowadays, we have everything we need to build a wood oven readily available in most refractory and building store yards.
Traditional wood burning pizza-bread ovens and cooking using a gentle fire are simply 'the low TEC highly efficient technology'. So primitive and interesting, it will not let us down.
What do we actually do when we use a wood burning brick oven?
A fire is built inside the oven. The fire burns, giving off the heat which the heavy oven walls absorb. When the dome chamber inside is heated to flat white-hot, the fire is allowed to die down or kept burning only very gently for longer. The embers can be swept out of the oven or left somewhere aside in the oven.
How long can you cook in a wood burning oven?
This depends on how well the dome of our wood oven is insulated on the outside, and also on how much wall mass the oven has. After heating up the very massive oven walls get hot enough to cook easily for a whole day. Traditionally, we cook with the oven's radiant heat, placing foods into the oven right as the temperature reaches the stage appropriate for the food. These ovens were traditionally used also to dry fruits, mushrooms, herbs or the firing wood for the next firing if it's fresh or too wet from the rain. They produce very useful low temperatures as well as the hot cooking environments for cooking the superb pizzas. My favorite activity is to cook or slow-roast all kinds of meats and to achieve very nice tenderness with the option for that lovely smoked flavour.
Wood ovens, particularly ovens made using firebricks, have domes that are only about 4 inches thick (10 cm). If well insulated on outside, then this is perfectly satisfactory for pizza oven and not as much for baking. But once you decide to build your own wood burning oven and after cooking pizzas you will prefer to do proper baking or roast large pieces of meats slow way at stable temperature, consider making the walls up to 6 inches (15 cm) thick by adding on 2 inches concrete cladding layer; such brick ovens will stay hot enough to cook for at least 6 hours using the heat energy generated at pizza making time. The extra dense mass is crucial. Your oven will be a lot more efficient and stronger. You may need to heat it up a little longer, but those 20 minutes and a few bucks extra for concrete gravel etc.
In restaurants, we can watch the small fire inside a wood oven. They operate their ovens this way in order to maintain even temperature over a long period of time. You know how happy the owner is to use their wood burning oven; it changes the whole situation a lot for them. Basically, they operate wood oven the way a "modern" oven is operated except the fuel is a firewood and the shapes are different. Wood burning pizza ovens have temperatures normally higher in the ceiling above and the floor is normally cooler (another physical law, convection, says heat is inclined to go up). This cooks pizza in about 90 seconds, leaving it with no burnt edges or bottom of the pizza base. It is impossibly expensive to maintain this temperature for a long periods of time in gas or electric ovens, and it's also not environmentally friendly to use modern conventional appliances*. Restaurant wood burning ovens are being used primarily for pizza and are being kept at a lower temperature because they keep the fire on and these ovens still cook fast. They are extremely easy to run, and guess what- They do not have to be cleaned from grease! Grease in the oven burns out on it's own.
How long does it take to heat up my wood fired pizza oven?
As per home ovens, the longest time I have seen is 2 hours for an oven being fired- it was a big family home oven holding heat comfortably for 40 breads surface area, whole lamb or 6 roasting pots with lids for big turkeys. Backyard or house wood burning ovens will be fully heated up in 1 to 1 1/2 hours. This is the aim. There is an early phase in the firing when the oven can smoke as you start it- it lacks fire kick start, it has thermal inertia. This is minimized by using dry wood, thin kindling, and blowing air into it. As the fire builds up in the temperature, the gasses given off by the burning wood will ignite and the whole oven will be filled with flames not smoke. It is important when you build the oven to make the flue and the chimney correctly as they draw off and direct the exhaust, and it is very important to calculate carefully the ratio of the entry door height to the inside dome vault height for proper burning. There are two types of thermometers owners of any wood burning oven can use; I absolutely prefer this self standing type however any digital oven thermometer will measure fine as well ... but invest into a digital thermometer only if you were interested to experiment or otherwise there's not extra benefit really.
Waste wood, old furniture, branches from trees, these are all sources of firing wood. You may want to split larger pieces, I do. But burn natural wood- don't burn wood that is painted or soaked with chemicals.
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