When it was first created? What characterizes this tradition today? Where will the future take us? Let’s discover the wood-fired oven baking.
Today, everyone knows the wood-fired oven and acknowledges its status. Its main features are the classic arched or rectangular mouth, the traditional inner dome and, above all, the wood logs crackling inside.
However, its origins go back to time immemorial. It seems that 29,000 years ago Homo sapiens built an underground pit that could be considered its ancestor. Nevertheless, the first real wood-fired oven as we now know it dates back to the Egyptians, although they kept separate the cooking area from the heating one. Then the Greeks and the Romans improved it and created a single combustion chamber, as we know it today.
In more modern times, the wood-fired oven was typically installed in rural areas, mainly for the bread production for the community. It was only later that it became the main star in thousands of pizzerias around the world. The increasing difficulty of finding good craftsmen to build the brick vaulted oven and the need for shorter production times, led to the creation of the prefabricated segment vaulted oven.
Today, the essential characteristics for a proper wood-fired oven are various; first of all, high quality materials must be used, such as refractory terracotta, which must have an ad hoc composition and the right percentage of alumina. Equally important is the choice of insulating materials, which must maintain heat, stabilize temperature and optimize production. Finally, you should not forget the study of measurements and thicknesses proportions, which is very important for optimal performance.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the wood-fired oven is certainly its load of tradition and craftsmanship. In fact, the wood-fired oven and the pizza maker have their own language of communication. When the interior walls and the vault become white, the pizza chef knows that the oven is ready to start baking. If the flame starts to go out and the light inside the oven is fading, the pizza maker knows it’s time to add more wood. Not to mention the ability to understand the oven temperature by simply placing a hand at half height at the entrance of the oven mouth: for experienced pizza chefs this is equivalent to thermometer measuring.
The advent of new technologies and new ecological awareness brought many changes in the world of pizza baking, including the introduction of new types of baking techniques. Among them there is gas baking technique, which is closer to the much-loved wood-fired one. To date, there are some types of gas burners that make it very difficult to distinguish a gas oven baked pizza from a wood-fired baked one. But you have to admit that there is nothing more fascinating than seeing a good steaming pizza with a crackling flame behind it.
