Fire on the side; not the back

[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