Fire on the side; not the back Firing Your Oven Discuss Fire on the side; not the back in the Oven Management forums; If you will be baking with a live fire (as you would when making pizza or other high heat dishes), ...

[james]

If you will be baking with a live fire (as you would when making pizza or other high heat dishes), you should push the fire to the side of the oven, not to the back. There are two good reasons for this.

First, you can see the side of the pizza (or whatever you are cooking) and be ready to turn it when brown. It’s harder to do that when the fire is in the back.

Second, your oven will cook better. Wood-fired ovens work by breathing in cold air through the lower part of the oven opening, heating it and circulating it around the oven dome, and then exhausting it out the top of the opening. By putting the fire in the back, you are giving the cold air a longer path before it hits the heat source, which is both cooler, and less likely to create a nice circular convection pattern.

James

[dconnolly]

A quick question. Has anyone out there built the fire on a metal pan and used that to contain the ashes and to move the fire around from starting in the center and then to the side? I used a 9 x 13 to build a small fire in for curing adn it worked really well, and since I did not yet have a oven brush, avoided a mess trying to clean out the ashes....made me wonder if I could do the same for baking?

[buckeyebreadman]

Being a relative newbie myself, I can't comment with any authority......however, it sounds brilliant to me!

[Les]

Some claim that the ash is what makes the pizza unique.