Wood Cooking – How to Use Different Temperatures to Prepare Your Food

Wood-fired cooking is becoming more popular as chefs and home cooks increasingly use this ancient cooking method to add some spice to their dishes. This “old-fashioned” cooking method certainly helps create unique flavors that simply can’t be achieved with other fuel methods like gas or electricity.

So how do you cook food in these wood-fired ovens? Putting pieces of wood in such a kiln creates fire and heat, which is absorbed by the kiln; this is what we call the cooking stage. Depending on the style of wood-burning oven, lighting the fire to a maximum temperature of over 932°F can take anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours. Our advice is that you do not turn on the oven only for one type of food like pizza, but plan some dishes to cook only once.

In this way, the heat is regenerated to cook different foods that you put in the oven. After the embers are cleaned and the oven begins to cool for a few hours, or even days (depending on the oven’s insulation and outside temperature) and the temperature gradually drops, the retained heat can be used to cook multiple batches of food. .

You need to plan the sequence of dishes you want to put in the wood oven and at what intervals. You can start with the dish that needs the most heat and leave the one that needs the least heat last. Use a proper hand held oven thermometer to check the temperature inside and add or remove pieces of wood to set the proper temperature for the food.

To bring the temperature up again (if you think the current temperature is too low for your food), simply add another piece of log. If necessary, you can also keep a small fire in the oven to help retain heat in the oven.

The type of wood you use can also affect oven temperatures. Most professional cooks use dry, well-seasoned hardwood such as oak, fruitwood, walnut, olive, avocado, walnut, or almond. Do not use charcoal or resinous woods such as pine or fir, as they can affect the flavor of your dishes.

Pizzas, flatbreads, and sandwiches can be cooked to temperatures between 572°F and 1,000°F by placing them on a very hot oven floor. Also, barbecued meat, chicken, and steaks can be cooked at higher temperatures (usually on a rack in the oven). Once the temperature cools to about 662°F, you can add vegetables like onions, eggplant, mushrooms, bell peppers, tomatoes, and bell peppers, or meatballs, ribs, and chicken wings. Pastry products, such as cakes, scones, and muffins, can be cooked at temperatures between 482°F and 536°F, and bread, dough, gratin, fish, squid, and scallops between 212°F and 392°F

You can use the remaining waning heat to cook desserts and certain cuts of meat that need to be very tender. These temperatures are just a guide, and the best thing you can do is get to know your wood-fired oven thoroughly, as different wood-fired ovens work differently.

You can also place different types of food inside to achieve more than one style of cooking or recipe. Try experimenting with placing your food in different areas of the oven, for example the oven floor, or place food in small pots or pans for broiling, broiling or boiling.

Finally, when you cook in a wood-fired oven, you can surely create the most delicious recipes with healthy, authentic and creative dishes suitable for anyone. Not only that, it’s also a lot of fun!