Wood-fired pizza ovens offer a unique flavour to food and wonderfully preserve the ingredients added to them. They can cook more than just pizza too, and cooking these other items, like bread, roasted veggies, or meats with the special oven, saves electricity. However, to get the most out of cooking with them, you should think about some tips and tricks to help you along:
Monitor Temperature:
It’s not as simple to maintain your desired temperature with the wood fired pizza ovens. Depending on what you cook, the desired temperature to monitor will vary, but overall you should aim for even cooking. To achieve this, firstly pay attention to how the fire is distributed, and secondly, make sure the wood is of consistent moisture, size, and type.
Firing up:
Regardless of what temperature you will need for your cooking process, you first need it to reach its optimum temperature throughout of 450 degrees Celcius. After, you can adjust it accordingly by moving the coals. During this adjustment period, you can always tell what the temperature is by reading the temperature of the oven floor with an infrared thermometer.
Here are the general cooking techniques you can achieve:
Baking
With oven temperatures at less than 200 degrees celcius, you can bake items like bread, pasta dishes, or desserts. This is a more gentle cooking method than the others and will maintain consistency.
Roasting
From about 200-350 degrees celsius, you can say your wood-fired oven is being used to roast food items. As a middle ground for cooking temps, it will cook dense foods throughout without burning any exterior bits.
High Heat
The most aggressive form of cooking with your wood-fired oven, this technique is used for your signature pizzas and flatbreads and other fast appetizers. At temperatures over 400 degrees celsius, you can execute some beautiful browning and caramelization of your foods. Wait until all soot has cleared from the oven dome to begin cooking with this method.
Grilling
If you slide some coals to the front of your oven and place a free-standing grill over them- Voila, you’ve got a ready-made BBQ! Heat will radiate from the coals, the iron grill, and convectively from the dome to crisp items up while locking in scrumptious moisture.
Maintain the Flame
Even if the oven has just the right temperature, your dishes won’t bake consistently if there’s no flame. You should, therefore experiment with the correct height of the flame and make it the same every time.
Adjusted Recipe
Make sure that any recipes you follow are meant for cooking with a wood-fired oven, as it is generally hotter than other cooking tools. For example, some doughs have too much sugar content which will burn faster in the wood-fired oven and make a pizza or bread seem ready when it isn’t.
Cooking foods with your wood-fired pizza can certainly make many of your food dreams come true and give you the tastes of heaven. Just be sure to really attend to the heat levels and maintain consistency because it will affect the outcome. That means monitoring the temperature appropriate for your cooking technique, ensuring the flame has the right height and checking that your recipes are right-on. Always remember to stay safe and take caution cooking with heat.
Read Also: