Perfecting Your Backyard with a Wood-Fired Oven

You may have looked at your backyard lately and thought that something was missing. Sure you’ve got the swimming pool, the lawn chairs and the outdoor refrigerator, but there is a certain flare that seems to be missing from the environment. A direct or indirect wood-fired oven may be just what you are looking for. If you’ve never seen a wood burning oven before then take a look through our wood fired oven gallery to see what the fuss is all about. Dolce Vita has a variety of outdoor wood burning ovens that would be a perfect addition to the decor in your backyard.

Our Forno direct and indirect wood-fired ovens can be constructed in a variety of different ways to fit in with the design concepts of your backyard. The ovens can be built into rock surfaces to maintain the same granite motif that's part of the rest of your backyard. They can be constructed as stand alone units or as part of a larger outdoor kitchen arrangement as well. Wood burning ovens provide an elegance and touch of class that is simply unmatched when it comes to outdoor cooking appliances. Not only will these ovens make your backyard look better, but they will make entertaining and cooking a far more enjoyable experience for you and your guests. There’s no reason to consider a wood-fired oven as an addition to your backyard.

Baking Bread in Your Wood Burning Oven

Most Americans these days buy their bread at the grocery store. While some companies try to sell a fresh product every day, especially local bakers, most bread you find at the store will be designed to last a long time. This built in longevity comes with a cost, flavor. Baking fresh bread at home was once a time honored tradition that has been replaced by mass factory baking that will do anything to cut costs. Baking bread at home is far easier than most people imagine. With a wood burning oven, it can not only be easy to bake bread, but the resulting flavor will be far beyond what you could have thought was possible.

Bread recipes for a wood burning oven are abundant and can be found on a variety of sites. The basic principles involve flour, water and yeast, but beyond that there are almost an infinite amount of combinations for making delicious home made bread. One of the most special aspects of baking bread in a wood burning oven is the ability of the dough to soak in the flavors of the wood smoke and any other dishes that we baking in the oven previously. This creates a unique flavor profile that you simply can’t get from store bought bread or by baking bread in a gas oven or bread machine.

The Spectacle of Wood Burning Ovens

We spend a lot of time here talking about how great wood burning ovens are for cooking pizza and traditional Italian dishes, but what sometimes gets left behind is how excited people are to watch the workings of a wood-fired oven. Most people simply don’t have experience cooking with fire unless they are frequent campers or own a wood burning stove of their own. Cooking with a wood fire is a completely different experience than cooking with gas or coal, and the process will have people looking on in awe.

Cooking with fire is a spectacle that the whole family can appreciate. From the first phase of lighting the wood to the bubbling cheese and crust of a finishing pizza, cooking with fire is an instinctive craving that exists in all of us. Not only will your wood burning oven produce terrific results in flavor and texture, but it will be wonderful to look at in the process. Half the appeal of cooking at home comes from the aromas and sounds that result from cooking with fire. Family and friends gathering around the wood-fired stove is one of the most appealing parts of cooking with fire, and the buzz generated from the spectacle will liven up the atmosphere more than any takeout food could.

Restaurants Prefer Wood-Fired Ovens

More and more lately we are seeing the presence of wood burning ovens in restaurants, not only physically in the restaurant itself, but in the title. Gourmet chefs and restaurant owners are slowly discovering how much better food can be in a wood burning oven. They are turning out wildly creative and delicious dishes that are having their customers raving. So what is the secret behind wood burning ovens that have all of these establishments changing their practices? One reason is that these wood-fired ovens are really able to pump out the heat. Wood burning ovens can reach temperatures far higher than normal gas ovens, and thus can create flavors that you would otherwise never be able to get.

Another reason customers and restaurants love their wood burning ovens is the spectacle. Burning wood creates a smell and display that is quite unlike any other restaurant experience. Many establishments decide to display their wood-fired ovens in easy to see locations so that customers can gaze on their pizza and other dishes as they cook next to open flames. This experience creates a buzz in the dining room and gets word about the restaurant spreading quickly. For all of these reasons and more, private homeowners are also finding the experience of wood burning ovens to be fantastic. Nothing is quite as special as baking a gourmet pizza or dessert right at home but with time honored cooking traditions that come straight from Italy.

What Makes a Wood Burning Oven Special?

Everyone knows what an oven is. You heat it up, put some food inside, close the door, the food gets hot, then you eat it. It’s old, old technology by which food gets better when the molecules inside heat up and release tons of flavors that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Cooking food has been around in human culture since we have written records and far before that. But through industrialization and modern technology the way we cook has become sterilized. Families and tribes used to cook around a wood burning fire, but now we cook in metal ovens heated by electric coils and a lot of the flavors have been lost.

Wood burning ovens bring families back to a traditional cooking style that is a huge part of our evolution. Food cooked with the heat of burning wood develops a distinct flavor profile that completely eclipses the flavors you get from a regular oven.  While a normal oven only imparts heat upon cooked food, wood burning ovens impart the flavor of the wood and smoke into everything that is cooked in the oven. This added flavor creates really unique dishes depending on the type of wood you use. This is why the best pizza and Italian restaurants in the world use wood burning ovens to cook their high quality items.

Making Great Pizza in a Wood Burning Oven

There are so many places out there that make bad pizza it’s hard to count. There are a lot of reasons for this. Pizza is so popular that a lot of people try to take advantage by making a cheap mass marketed but ultimately flavorless product. Some people just don’t know how to make a great pizza because they don’t have the right ingredients or the right tools. Truly great pizza needs a few things to be great. It needs fresh high quality ingredients, attention and it needs to be cooked in a wood burning oven.  There are two very important reasons for this.

Using wood burning pizza ovens for cooking is a time honored tradition in Italy. If you want Italian food that tastes like it does in the home country, or you simply want your food to taste better period, cooking in a wood fired oven in a superior option. One reason this is true is that wood burning ovens can reach temperatures far higher than your traditional kitchen oven. This higher heat creates flavors in your food that you might have never tasted before. Second, the wood in wood fired ovens helps create unique flavors in your dishes, especially pizza. Pizza cooked at high temperatures has caramelized flavors and textures that you simply can’t get from a normal oven. It also absorbs the wonder flavor from the wood smoke, making each pizza you make unique and delicious.

More than just Pizza in a Wood-Fired Pizza Oven

Most people know that wood burning ovens are great for cooking traditional pizza, but not everyone is aware that these ovens can be used for almost any type of recipe imaginable, creating unique and interesting flavors.  One of our favorite ways to use the Forno wood burning ovens aside from pizza is to cook time honored Italian dishes.  You’ll be shocked at the flavor differences you get between cooking things like lasagna in a gas oven compared to a wood-fired one. Baked Ziti develops flavors in the meat and sauce that you might have thought were never possible. One of our favorite classic Italian meals, however, is porchetta.

If you have never heard of porchetta before, well, let me introduce you to it. Pronounced as ‘porketta’,  porchetta is basically a whole lot of pork stuffed with a bunch of delicious herbs as well as a bunch more pork.  We’re so excited about this item that we made a video on how to make porchetta in a wood burning oven. Making this item may seem like a lot of work, and the presentation may seem really foreign to people who are not used to working with whole pigs, but we promise that the flavor you get out of porchetta is second to none. It would be a shame to have a wood-fired oven and not experience that magic that is the whole roasted pig.

Porchetta from Lisa D'Addazio on Vimeo.