Tips For Cooking In Your Wood Fired Pizza Oven
COOKING TIMES
The cooking times in a DIY Pizza Oven takes about 75% of the time you would usually cook the same meal in a regular household oven. The amount of time it takes to heat up your pizza oven depends on the type of food you want to cook in it.
Pizzas require the most heat, and a good hour and a half will see your oven cooking with a nice heat. On the other hand if you are cooking fish or seafood you require less heat and will only need 15-20 minutes to pre-heat the pizza oven.
DIY PIZZA OVEN TEMPERATURES
You will get to know your oven’s temperature as you start to experiment with it. You may wish to purchase an infra-red thermotor available on the market, however we find that the old reliable and cheap hand testing method works well. To test the temperature with your hand, make a fist and place your hand into the oven near the door. Let the oven take the chill off it (especially if its the middle of winter!) then remove your hand from the oven and place it straight back into it near the door. Count the amount of seconds that you can hold your hand inside the oven before it gets too hot and you need to remove it. No joking! ‘Pizza Hot’ is about 2 seconds, ‘Bread and pudding hot’ is about 6-7 seconds. We find that half the fun of these ovens is keeping it simple and old fashioned.
A hot oven should be created every time the oven is lit, regardless of what you are cooking. This is important to ensure that the floor and chambers are heated to cook for extended period of time at lower temperatures. To maintain or increase the temperature of your oven, simply add wood.
LIGHTING YOUR DIY PIZZA OVEN
What type of wood?
It is recommended that you use any type of hard wood in your pizza oven. Hard wood burns for longer. Make sure that the wood is dry before adding the fire. Wet wood will take longer to burn and may smoke. Wet wood refers to wood that contains sap as well as wood that has been exposed to liquid. Wet wood can be dried out over time in a dry storage space.
How do I light it?
Start by lighting the fire in the middle of the oven, this way you heat up the floor tiles that you are going to cook on. We use firelighters and dry hard wood kindling to get the fire going. Choose fire lighters that don’t produce a chemical smell or smoke. Once the kindling has been lit, Place two larger logs onto the fire. Once the fire has caught onto the larger logs, you may slide the fire more towards the back of the oven and continue to build it up from there.
If the fire is not burning, check the positioning of your wood and fire lighters and check whether the wood is dry or not. If you have moisture in the oven you may also find it hard to burn wood properly. Test for moisture by putting the door onto the oven front of an oven that has been lit and leaving it for a few moments. Pull away the door and see if moisture is on it. If your oven is moist, get the oven really really hot by lighting 6-7 logs of wood to remove the moisture, then let the fire burn down.
Do I need to worry about left over ash from the last time I cooked in it?
Damp ash will stop you from lighting your oven and needs to be removed. If the ash is dry, there is no need to remove it from your oven after every use. Dry ash actually helps to light up your oven light.
