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.

Gourmet Pizza for a Wood Fired Oven

Most people are very familiar with your standard pizza: tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, pepperoni, sausage and a few other key ingredients make up the majority of pizzas you’ll see in your standard home. Gourmet pizzas, however, don’t necessarily follow these rules. Gourmet pies can contain almost any ingredient you can imagine and are really only limited by your imagination as a chef. These types of pizzas range from breakfast pies with bacon and eggs to vegetarian pizzas with exotic vegetables and spices from lots of different types of cuisine.

Of course, like any pizza, gourmet pies are best cooked in a wood fired oven like the Forno Premium or the Forno Classico. This is because wood burning ovens can bring enough heat to create a distinctive flavor in your pizza. When building a gourmet pie, pick only the finest ingredients. When cooking, make sure the get the temperature up high enough in your oven so that the cheese and toppings can form a nice caramelized crust that will greatly enhance the flavor. There’s no need to go out for gourmet pizza any longer when you can build delicious pies in the comfort of your own home with your own indirect wood fired pizza oven.

How to Cook with Your Wood Burning Oven

If you are new to working in a wood fired oven, the prospect of cooking for the first time can seem daunting. Cooking in a wood burning oven, however, is much easier than it may seem. The first thing you should probably do is watch a few of the videos that Dolce Vita offers on its site going through the parts and process of cooking in a Forno wood burning oven. Once you know the basics of how the oven works and how it is prepared, it’s time to start cooking.

The type of wood you choose to burn when cooking is very important. It is essential to use hard dry wood so that the oven doesn’t crack and so that you don’t get the foul taste of smoke that tends to come off more wet woods. Good choices for hard dry woods are oak, almond, fruitwood, walnut and pecan. The type of wood you select will impact the flavor of whatever you are cooking. Once your wood is burning in the oven, you can adjust the temperature by dampening or increasing the flame. This be can accomplished by adding more wood, closing and opening certain vents and other actions.

Bread Recipe for Your Wood-fired Oven

If you haven’t heard, your Forno indirect wood burning oven is great for making bread. From sourdough to whole wheat and even Challah, a wood-fired oven will turn out fantastic baked bread time after time. The following is a quick and basic recipe to get you started, but there are basically no limitations on what kind of bread you will be able to bake in your wood burning oven.

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups plain flour
2 1/2 cups whole meal flour
3 cups lukewarm water
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon yeast
2 1/2 teaspoon bread improver (for faster preparation)
1 teaspoon olive oil

Preparation
-Place all the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix together well. Make a well in the center of the mixture and pour in the wet ingredients. Gradually incorporate the dry mix into the wet until you get consistent dough that feels consistent and a little tacky.
-Place a sheet of saran/cling wrap on the dough as well as up the sides of the bowl. Leave the dough and let it rise for about 30 minutes. It should double in size.
-Remove cling wrap and place the dough on a well-floured table surface and cover with flour.
-Using a knife or spatula, take your desired portion of the dough and shape it into a round ball, then flatten it with the palm of your hand.
-Place the dough directly onto the wood-fired oven floor
-Monitor the bread and watch it bake in a few minutes. The time it takes to bake will depend on the heat of the oven and where the bread is placed. The most important thing is to watch it and make sure it doesn’t burn.