Reasons to Choose Wood Fired Pizza

Your Pizza Is Cooked and Ready Quickly

Whether you buy the ingredients to make your own pizza, or grab a take-away from your favourite pizza food truck or shop on the way home from work, pizza has become the convenience food of choice for our modern busy lifestyle. Wood fired ovens are known for their fast baking times due to their incredibly high temperatures. Pizza, flatbreads and other foods can all cook within a few minutes.

In terms of pizza, the oven at home has limitations with a maximum temperature of around 250 degrees, as compared to the 370 to 430 degrees celcius attained by most pizza ovens. What this means is that it will take you anywhere from 8 to 20 minutes to cook a pizza in your kitchen oven, on top of the 20 to 30 minutes required to preheat your oven.

You can significantly reduce that cooking time by using a wood fired pizza oven, which can quickly reach a temperature of around 380 degrees. You can expect your wood fired pizza to be ready in under 5 minutes, as compared to maybe 30 minutes in a regular oven.

More Flavor to Your Food

One of the main reasons to get a wood fired pizza is the incredible flavour and aroma that only charred cooking can bring. This allows you to add tastes that you can’t achieve with spices and sauces, and it brings an earthy element to your cooking.

Even heat distribution means that a pizza cooked in a wood fired oven is going to taste a lot better than one cooked in your regular kitchen oven. The delicious smokey flavour is second to none and simply can not be achieved using a standard oven or gas. 

Retain Essential Nutrients In a Wood Fired Oven

Using a wood fired method of cooking can mean a healthier style of pizza too, as fruit and vegetable toppings tend to retain more antioxidants and nutrients because they are cooked a lot more quickly. A pizza will not have the same nutritional value if it takes longer to cook, as in your regular kitchen oven. 

A More Natural Way of Cooking

For many, the greatest appeal of a wood fired oven is that the heat source is 100% natural. This is one way to avoid the use of chemicals and it is a more environmentally friendly heat source. There really is something special about wood-fired pizza cooking. Humans have been cooking with fire for thousands of years and we continue to gravitate towards this traditional method of cooking today because there really is nothing that can replicate the smokey aroma and taste.

The Art of Cooking with a Wood Fire

With electric and gas ovens, all you do is switch it on and wait for it to preheat. To cook with a wood fired oven, you need to understand the way it heats up, the different types of heat that is generated and how to maintain the optimum temperature throughout the cook. 

1. Heat conducted by the stone floor
   Controlling the floor temperature in the oven is critical to ensuring the perfect crispy base. 
2. Radiant Heat inside the dome
   The fierce energy of the fire is absorbed by the dome and this heat can be retained for hours depending on the type of oven you use. Clay ovens can maintain heat in the dome for up to 24 hours after the fire is extinguished. This heat helps to cook the pizza base so and help the dough to bake. You can usually tell when the oven is ready to be used as the walls of the dome will have turned completely white.
3. Convection heat created by the flow of the flames
   This heat works exactly like a convection oven and helps bake the pizzas, cooking all of the ingredients as well as melting the mozzarella to give that cheesy pull we all love. The flames roll across the dome and are a critical part of cooking the perfect pizza.
4. Direct heat from the intense flames
   Maintaining a consistent temperature inside the oven by feeding the fire with wood every 10-15 minutes is critical. Once the temperature drops the base of the pizza will cook faster than the toppings, resulting in a burned crust, blonde cheese, and undercooked ingredients.