firing a wet oven

[paulages]

thanks for the compliments, chris. the barn in the background is over a hundred years old, and was rotting from the ground up. it's almost completely rebuilt now, with a nice new radiant heated floor, new greenhouse you can also see in some of the pictures. our backyard was just a plain grass yard when we bought the house 5 years ago, and now every inch is garden, greenhouse, pond, pizza oven or patio.

i've always loved the idea of a living roof, especially since our backyard is a huge garden to begin with. a couple of years ago, i was driving through the northern part of norway, above oslo, and just about every house or barn had 3 feet of grass growing on top. upon further inspection, i found that almost all roofs are shingled with a local slate-type stone, cut into squares (1' or so) and shingled in a diamond pattern. i think this just promotes moss growth, which eventually of course builds soil, and grass ends up growing on it. it was really beautiful and had a nice natural look. i wish i had taken pictures.

[paulages]

oven's dry!

i fired my oven up on wednesday, and got it up to pizza temp, and it finally seemed dry again. friday i had a pizza party, and fired it a couple of hours early, just to be sure. i'm still going through a lot of firewood, but i'm finally getting the temperatures i want. the floor won't stay abovt 600 unless i have an absolutely roaring fire going, but i believe this was a 750 deg. floor, and a 950 deg ceiling:

[binkchad]

Golly, I was so proud of my Jiffy Mix corn muffins!

[james]

Nice muffins

Chris,

Nice looking muffins. Did you mill the corn yourself? :-)

The main school of thought is that for mid-heat baking -- bread, muffins, roast chicken, etc., you can shovel out all of your coals and cook with just the retained heat in the dome. The coals don't add anything at that point, other than ash. Try removing the coals, and giving the oven a couple of minutes to settle, then bake.

Try the Mississippi counting method. 4 Mississippis is a pretty hot oven (about 500F), 2-3 is very hot, etc.

For pizza, keep the coals in the oven, and push them all to one side. You don't want coals behind the pizza or on both sides. The perfect flame laps about half way up the dome, and reflects heat on the pizza.

Send more photos.

James

[paulages]

The perfect flame laps about half way up the dome, and reflects heat on the pizza.

james,
by half way up, so you mean half way up the walls, or halfway meaning to the peak? i pretty much can't get 90 sec. pizza temps without having an 'up and over' flame, at least reaching the top. i can get 850F or so out of the walls without this high of a flame, but can't get above 700F on the floor or a good 950F from the top and side walls without a pretty good fire. does this sound abnormal to you?

[james]

Hi Paul,

Peter and I cooked at a customer's oven today and played around with our Infrared thermometer -- so it's all still fresh in my (often failing) mind.

I was watching the flame in the dome, and I still think that the flame works best when it reaches more than half way across the dome. I think the reflecting heat really helps you fuse the olive oil on the top of the pizza. The oven had been fired for a little over an hour with so-so wood and the dome was easily into the 800's, and the boost from the flame was nice.

My view is that keeping the hearth hot is always the biggest challenge. Our recent experience is that a good fire on the side also drives heat across the cooking floor. At a really big party (75 pizzas in a little over an hour), I watched the floor fall in heat, only to get re-charged by bringing the fire up a little hotter. The Infrared showed the heat moving across the floor and the floor heat would come back up.

Do you think your hearth is really fully cured? How many big nights of cooking have you had in it? Is there a chance your oven floor will get better with more use?

It's the trouble keeping the floor up to heat that makes me think about the island hearth. It's harder to install, but I think it makes the floor more responsive. It isn't for everyone, but if you really want to push the oven -- it can make sense.

James

[paulages]

it's possible that it's still not fully cured yet---concrete really does take a long t time to fully cure---but i have fired it fairly regularly (except for a few rainy weeks there before i got the roof up) since august.

could you clarify again: by half way across the dome, do you mean that flame is covering half of the entire surface area of the dome? that's about what works best for me, and i have experienced similar results in terms of watching floor temperatures relative to the size of the fire.

if i end up opening a place and building another oven, i will certainly use the island design. how did the subfloor of firebricks work out for you?

75 pizzas in an hour! that's good time. i can crank out pizzas pretty fast, in terms of tossing and topping, but i haven't quite mastered the rhythm of cooking multiple pizzas in the oven with 90 second cook times. rotating is crucial, but complicates rotating multiple pies in and out. logistically, i am very hampered by the location of my oven to my make table as well.

[jayjay]

Weather and Rain

Here we have had two CAT 3 Typhoons this year, one in May and one in September. I am wondering how folks keep the rain and water out of the
outdoor ovens.
JJ
Philippines

[james]

Water and wood-fired cooking do not go together. So, you should do everything you can to keep water out of the oven and the insulation, which should include making sure the oven enclosure is waterproof, having a cap on your chimney to keep water from coming down onto the vent landing, and using a door. You might want to put together some form of roof over the oven and the opening.
James