How I fire my oven

[fremen325]

Here are my notes on how to fire up the oven. I am getting ready to move and wanted to leave notes for the next family on what to do.

1. The fire bricks are sensitive to the absorption of water. If they have moisture in them, they will spall (crack and potentially explode) which is bad. If the oven has not been used in a while, be sure to run a series of small fires in the oven to dry it out. Generally, start this process about a week prior to your planned use of the oven and build a bigger fire each day until the oven is dried out and ready to go for your cooking event. Fire bricks are expensive, not as durable as a regular brick, and it is very difficult to replace them in the floor so be gentle with them.
2. Prepare your dough the day before your cooking event. Pull the dough out of the fridge about 5 hours prior to cooking.
3. It takes approximately 6-7 hours to get the oven up to pizza cooking temperature.
4. Never use charcoal, painted wood, pine or sap woods, or treated lumber.
5. Begin by loading the oven with hardwood logs around the outside of the floor area.
6. Pile a larger amount of kindling in the middle than you think you need.
7. Start putting hardwood splits and other easy to catch wood pieces on the kindling.
8. Start your kindling burning and be ready to tend to the fire.
9. The fire will need air until it is really going. I use a blow stick. The issue is that until there is sufficient heat, the smoke is slow to exit and will choke your fire. The rising heat will suck the smoke out the chimney and suck in air once it is going well. You can tell this is occurring once the bottom 3/4 of the entrance is mostly smoke-free and the fire is starting to really go.
10. Add more wood as necessary.
11. At about the 4 hour mark (if you have been feeding it well), the interior top of the dome should start to turn white as the soot burns off. When this happens, you are on the right track.
12. As the soot burnoff line drops, you are getting close. The bricks inside the dome should have cleared their soot when the oven is at proper temperature. This takes time.
13. When the oven is ready, push the coals and unburned logs to the back wall.
14. Brush off the cooking surface with the metal brush.
15. See YouTube videos about cooking the pizza. The biggest problem will be the floor is too hot and burns the bottom of your pizza before the top has cooked. I tend to start my pizzas a bit further from the back wall (closer to the front) and just rotate them. If the cheese hasn’t melted and your crust is starting to burn, you can lift the pizza towards the top of the oven and it will quickly melt. This is a quick way to finish the pizza.
16. I recommend brushing the burned flour etc into the coal/ash pile at the back between pizzas to minimize the ash on the bottom of the pizza.
17. Cook subsequent pizzas by starting in different locations. This will give the floor time to reabsorb heat in that spot.
18. Once you are done, rake the coals and unburned wood to cover the floor. This will burn off any food debris and help insure that all the wood is burned to ash.
19. If you intend to do bread in the oven the next day (because the oven will still be around 400F), put the inner door seal in place. Otherwise, leave oven open for the night.
20. Clean your pizza peels after use.
21. The oven will still be hot and the coals are still hot in the morning. Rake the coals and ash to the front of the oven and dispose of into the ash bin. It will take a day or two for the ash bin coals to go out and go cold. Do not dump ash until the bin is cold (usually 2-3 days).
22. Once the ash is out of the oven, I like to run the blower to get the dust out before putting oven into storage mode. That way the ash cannot hold any moisture in the oven. Don’t leave ash in the pizza oven for long periods of time.
23. Once the oven is cleaned out, set the inner door seal and put the block in place. Then set the outer door seal. Clean up the area from the spilled ash.

[david s]

Thanks for those. here are my notes on maintenance.