Traditianal Italian - wood oven baked pizza

mirco.snt (62)Italian Chefin Steem Skillshare • 3 years ago

Intro

I had the opportunity to use a wood oven to bake some homemade pizzas with this traditional technique, and I would like to share with you my "skills" on this specific topic, that I think could be interesting to share with you guys!

The secrets, in my personal opinion, and I'm not a pizzaiolo pro, are essentially:

The preparation of the dough
The quality of the ingredients
The wood oven

If one of these is missing, the final product can not be considered perfect.
Unfortunately, in the experience I'm going to share with you, while the dough was perfect, and the oven was there, the ingredients were not the best, so I can't say that the final pizza was "perfect"!

Said so, today I don't want to explain how to prepare the dough in details but more on how to manage the wood oven.

Warm up the oven

Unfortunately it is not possible to turn it on with a button, and wait a few minutes, but it is a long process to actually arrive at the right temperature.

First to turn it on fast and hot is necessary to have a nice amount of small and dry wood, it is possible to get it by walking in any forest a couple of days before the cooking day, and collect some wood sticks, even if they are a bit humid, you will have time to let them dry up once at home.

Once you have enough of them, dry, be sure of course to have enough logs to bake enough pizzas, I can tell you that a big log is just to warm the oven and 2 more for the cooking process.

First burn a couple of starters, like the one you use for your barbecue, and on top of them the dry sticks, after 5 or 10 minutes, add a couple of bigger sticks, and go ahead with bigger sticks until the flame is quite big, and it can reach the other side of the oven.

At this point, wait that the oven start to get really hot, it is important that you keep the oven door always opened, else, the fire will immediately tun off.

I can tell that you need to wait around 30 minutes, during this time you can prepare a bigger wood log, if it is a bid wet like mine you can simply put it at the edge of the oven door to dry out.

Do not be in rush, and wait, that the oven need to get really hot, as you can see in the photo, you also need to create a good base with very hot burned wood.

Once the flames starts to diminish, and you have already a nice base of burned wood that do not produce flames anymore, it is time to add the first big log.

This whole process can last at least one hour.

Ready to cook

At this post you need to decide if to start immediately, and I suggest you to do so if you have a lot of guests, and a lot of pizzas to cook, so the process of keeping the oven hot will be together with the cooking process.

If this is not your case, I suggest you once the big log is almost completely burned, to close the oven door, and wait one hour more, to allow the oven to get very hot in each single part, and to increase the smoked flavor you will get once you will start to cook the pizzas.

So after one hour, all the smokes should have been absorbed by the oven walls, and now everything is hot and perfect!

Once you re-open the door, wait a few minutes, and allow the oxygen to get inside again and the combustion should restart as well, if it doesn't restart just add a medium dry stick, and once you see the flames again a big log, when the log starts to burn properly it is time for pizza!

Cooking

As I said, this post is not about the dough, that it deserves a full entry by itself!

I can just say here that, the real Napoli style dough require at least 8 hours fermentation, someone will say you even 24 or more, in any ways here I can just tell you that it takes a lot of time, and this is a very fundamental part of preparing a good pizza as I said already.

Once ready, divide it in 200 grams pieces, like in the photos above, and cover with one transparent foil and a wet cloth, and bring them close by the oven where, you should have prepared your preparation set.

Here you will be able to prepare the dough into the proper round shape, and add all the raw ingredients.

Once ready, like in the photo, immediately grab your oven shovel, and put the pizza in the oven, close by the fire.

If the oven has been heat properly you will need just a couple of minutes, then you will round the pizza in order to give the same temperature in each part of the circle.

The whole process will take less than 8 minutes, and you will be good to understanding once it will be finally ready, but as I said it is a rather quick process.

At this point, just remove the pizza from the oven, and voilà, your Margarita is ready!

Now you can prepare all kind of pizzas you wish, with all the ingredients you like, mushrooms, olives, or any kind of sliced meat.