Check out the cooking pages on Forno Bravo.com. There are some good ideas there for different cooking techniques.
For pizza, you definitely have the fire burning inside the oven. You want the flame lapping most of the way across the dome, and bouncing heat down on the cooking surface. That same logic holds true for a lot of high-heat dishes, including appetizers, fish and other things that really like the high heat. You can also start some dishes (recipes where you brown, or saute) in a hot oven with a flame going, where you later cover the dish and let it cook as the oven cools. You can even cook roast potatoes really fast with a hot, fire in the oven. Pre-heat a stainless steel pan, the add oil and bring it up to heat, then add you diced potatoes to the hot pan and put it in the hot oven. You can get them brown and tender, without burning, in short order. Literally mintues.
The fire is necessary and does use up some cooking floor space (this isn't true for bread and baking where you have removed the fire). A 35" oven is considered a 3 small/2 midsize pizza at a time oven -- including the fire.
For pizza, you keep adding wood, one stick at a time, to keep the fire going the entire time you are cooking pizza. The fire also drives heat across the oven floor -- as shown by my "log holder experiment."
James |