It’s around baked dough topped with sauce, cheese, meat, and veggies that can be cooked in various ways. You’ll need a wood-fired pizza oven and the correct cooking wood to make excellent pizza at home. Once you’ve learned the technique of utilizing a wood-fired pizza oven, you’ll be able to cook restaurant-quality pizza at home. Our goal in this post is to help you understand the key differences between good and terrible firewood.
Visit our pizza oven firewood store today to order the best pizza wood available!
Why Wood is important
Each wood burns differently. A perfect pie can be the difference between a perfect disaster and a perfect pie.
Various tree species vary in density. They generate sap, moisture, and odor compounds. As a result, they burn at varied rates, temperatures, and smoke output. Perfectly seasoned wood for a pizza oven burns fiercely and slowly without much smoke.
Look for two distinct variations in your pizza oven fuel. First, is it hardwood or softwood? Second, how old is it? This will greatly improve the outcome of your pizza.
How to Choose the Best Wood for Your Ooni Oven
The pandemic forced many of us to choose between spending a fortune ordering food or making it ourselves!
I chose to improve my pizza-baking talents. Before the epidemic, I enjoyed cooking for myself, but only when bored or had a day off. I’d say I cook about 80% of my meals now.
Finally, it makes me feel better. There is no need to be embarrassed about asking a waiter to add or remove an ingredient when I know exactly what I’m eating.
To improve my pizza-making skills, I bought an Ooni oven last year, together with a pizza stone and a large metal pizza peel.
I can verify that they can bake a terrific pizza (and are a lot of fun).
Choosing the correct cooking wood for your woodfired pizza oven is essential. For reasons I’ll explain later, you don’t want to use any old wood you find sitting around. I’ve found that Smoak’s cooking firewood is the best I’ve tried.
For everyday use, it’s a bit pricy, but because I only bake pizzas once or twice a week, it’s not an issue.
Smoak has many wood species. Each kind gives the pizza a distinct “smoky” flavor. The distinction is subtle but discernible. Here’s what to expect from each category.
What is the best wood to use for pizza?
The barrels in which bourbon is aged are made from white oak. There is a light, slightly sweet flavor with hints of vanilla and spice produced by the tree. For Neapolitan-style pizza, it’s great all-around wood.
It’s red oak.
Red oak is known to burn exceptionally hot, so if you are cooking a thick pizza like a deep dish or meat lovers with thick chunks of meat, it is a perfect choice. It produces a more pronounced mesquite/smoky flavor than white oak.
Maple
It is sweet and light in flavor. This is a great choice for thin-crust pizzas like Margherita-style or for pizzas that contain white meat, such as chicken or turkey.
The Hickory
You have probably tasted Hickory before if you eat bacon (since many bacon companies offer hickory-smoked bacon). Having the spicy, tangy flavor, it burns at a medium temperature, produces mild smoke, and produces a mild smell.
Strawberry
If you want to add an extra hint of fruitiness to your pizza, cherry wood is a good choice. A good supreme pizza with many vegetables or a pineapple pizza (don’t hate me) goes particularly well with this combination.
Cook with Kiln Dried Wood
Use dry cooking wood in your pizza oven. Damp wood burns less efficiently.
It will produce less heat from the organic wood content if you can fire it. So your pizza oven’s temperature will be too low to get a crispy crust. Dry wood emits significant levels of particles into the air, some of which will drop on your pizza.
Pizza Cut Cooking Wood Rack Once a Month, Don’t presume a piece of wood is dry because it doesn’t feel damp.
A tree’s moisture content is normally approximately 50% when chopped down or falls. After a year, the wood’s moisture content reduces to 20-30%, but it has already started to degrade and lose density.
Cutting Edge Firewood uses the industry’s strictest drying process. After cutting the wood, we kiln dry it for 48 hours at 250 degrees, which removes a lot of moisture and kills bugs, fungi, and mold. Our wood is the best globally, with a moisture content of 5-10%.
Choosing the Right Size
Woodcuts come in all shapes and sizes, each with its function. Using wood cooking chunks or splits to cook pizzas on a Kamado grill like the Big Green Egg or Primo. This wood is too tiny for a full-sized wood-burning oven.
Forno Piombo, Alfa Oven, and Fontana Forni require our 16-inch pizza cut firewood. Professional pizza cooks helped us design this pizza woodcut. Each cut is 16′′ long and 1-2′′ wide, making it easy to ignite and fast heat. With just 6 pieces of pizza sliced wood, you can start a fire in 30 minutes. Because the wood is thick, it burns faster and longer than other woods on the market.
Try our smallest pizza cut if you have a smaller pizza oven like the Ooni Pro. This wood is 6′′ long and 1-2′′ thick, perfect for mini-pizzas. Our wood burns incredibly well and is hot, giving you and your visitors a terrific backyard experience!
What kind of wood can I use for my Ooni oven?
Using cooking wood for a woodfire oven is essential since it guarantees that the wood is clean (no dangerous chemicals, cleaners, or pesticides) and dry (wet/damp wood burns horribly). Though it is more expensive than simply picking up sticks from your backyard, it is worth it.
Ooni ovens can be used with woodchips or pellets?
You can use wood smoking chips or pellets in your Ooni oven if you’re cooking a thin-crust pizza or a small appetizer. As a result, a big pizza will take longer to cook because small chips burn at a lower temperature.
When You Burn Wood, Do You Mean Firewood Or Cooking Wood?
Your next question may be whether you can use firewood with your Ooni oven. The answer is no. Even though wood for a traditional fire is dry, there is also a lot of sap in it. Sap helps keep bonfires burning, but it’s toxic to eat/inhale, and it will taint your pizza bitter. Not to mention, removing the sap from your pizza stone is a major hassle.
Can I use charcoal in my Ooni oven?
The only thing you need for your woodfire oven is clean-burning charcoal. Nevertheless, I don’t recommend it since it gives your pizza a weird taste similar to hamburgers. It also leaves a thick, black residue inside your oven that is much harder to remove than traditional wood smoke.
Tips for Using a Pizza Oven
Follow these tips to cook delicious pizza in a pizza oven along with using the right wood:
- Your pizza oven should have an internal temperature of 700 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Adding more cooking wood will raise the temperature.
- Start the fire in the center of your pizza oven, and move the coals to the back when you’re ready to add the pizza.
- Make sure the oven is clean after each use.
- Do not use the sugary dough. Cooking pizza in a conventional kitchen oven is fine with sugar-based dough. However, it causes the crust to cook unevenly when used in a wood-fired pizza oven.
- Oven. Do not overbake your pizza. A fully cooked pizza should only take one to two minutes if your pizza oven reaches a temperature of 700 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit. The crust or toppings may burn if they can cook for more than two minutes.
- Be careful when adding and removing your pizza.
- Although it’s called a “pizza oven,” you can cook other food items in it, including potatoes, bread, fish, hamburgers, and more.
You shouldn’t limit yourself to cooking pizza in a conventional oven. You can create a better-tasting pizza using a pizza oven with the right wood than you can with a kitchen oven. When you’ve mastered it, you can cook other foods with it.
Using dried and seasoned hardwoods is the best choice for your wood fire oven when it comes to getting the best results. Dense hardwoods provide a long burn time and high heat for wood-fired pizza to turn out the most flavorful, evenly-cooked pizza.
It comes down to your personal preference regarding the type of hardwood to use. Smoke from oak and pecan imparts mild and subtle flavors, while mesquite and hickory create an earthy, earthy flavor. If you want to create a flavor profile for your pizza, consider what toppings you will use and what kind of wood you will use. If you are not satisfied with the results the first time, you can always try a different wood the next time.
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