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E.g. 'Charcoal' 'Pizza Tool', 'Electric Lighter'
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Want to know how to use a pizza oven? Follow this guide when lighting your oven. For wood fire cooking, you always light your oven with the door and flue open. For this, you will need:
Want to know how to light firewood safely and easily? Do not use standard white firelighters as they contain chemicals that may get into the wood fired pizza oven floor and affect the flavour of your food. Never use lighter fluid to start or refresh a fire.
Kiln dried kindling wood is the ideal wood to fire up the oven. Make sure it’s extremely dry and of the highest calibre.
Such as oak, ash, beech, cherry, apple, pear, hawthorn, olive or kiln dried hardwood with a moisture content of less than 20%. Hardwood achieves the desired pizza oven temperature and produces less ash. Softwood has an unpleasant smell, and painted or treated wood can give off toxic fumes. Ise smaller logs of approximate 30cm long and 4 tpo 6cm in diameter. The size of the logs is key to provide the oven with its optimum conditions for cooking.
WARNING
It is the flame in the fire that warms the clay dome and builds the heat in your oven. A large fire with vigorous flames will not equate to higher internal temperatures and a better cooking result.
You do not need a large flame or a large fire to build the heat in your oven. Add your wood logs one at a time, allowing the previous log to burn before you add the next one. This will allow you to have more control over the oven temperature.
OVERLOADING THE OVEN CAN CAUSE PROLONGED LARGE FLAMES AND EXCESSIVE SMOKE THAT COULD DAMAGE THE FRONT BRICKWORK OF YOUR OVEN.
Open the flue (12 o’clock position) and door.
Place a firelighter in the centre of the pizza oven floor.
Stack small pieces of kindling around it to form a Jenga-style tower that’s five or six rows high (see image).
Place two small hardwood logs on the tower.
Light the fire.
WARNING
A fire too close to the front of the oven can cause a permanent separation of the metal and damage to the front of your oven.
If you need to, keep the oven door half opened. This will block any wind and stop the smoke from rolling out until the oven reaches its ideal temperature.
Each Fuego wood fired pizza oven is a unique artisan piece with its own temperature points, which you will need to get used to. The heating time of each ovenwill vary depending on the size and type of wood used but it tends to be between 30 and 45 minutes.
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Place your logs near the mouth of the wood oven a few minutes before you need to use them. This will warm and dry them which helps them to ignite quickly when you place them on the fire.
By general rule, you don’t need to add any more wood logs once the pizza oven temperature reaches 150℃ because your oven will carry on increasing in temperature even without any fire or flames.
Use a long-handled metal hook or brush to push the burning logs and hot coals to one side of the pizza oven. You can use whichever side you prefer but it’s a good idea to alternate after each use so that you get even wear. Moving the fire to one side allows the heat to circulate within the wood burning oven instead of escaping out the front.
It is easier to move food around your home pizza oven and you can put a new log on the fire without having to lift it over your food. Place the logs together so they are overlapping, one on top of the other. If you have lost the flame, add another firelighter.
IMPORTANT ADVICE
Soot staining is an inevitable development on the look of a well-used wood-fired oven. If you cannot live with it, you can reduce its appearance by using a hard bristle brush on the area, in order to remove any excess tar and carbon particles but be aware this will not remove the staining completely. We recommend not to apply any type of liquid or chemical that might damage the surface of the fire clay bricks or mortar and void the warranty of your oven.
WARNING
If you have lost the flame and there is insufficient burning material in the fire bed to light a new fuel charge, excessive smoke emission can occur. Refuelling must be carried out onto a sufficient quantity of glowing embers and ash that the wood logs will ignite in a reasonable period. If there are too few embers in the fire bed, add suitable kindling to prevent excessive smoke or add another firelighter.
Once the wood fired pizza oven has reached the ideal temperature, you will need to close the door and flue to ensure the oven heat is retained and then start cooking.
You can open the door during the cooking process to check on your food. If you are cooking for a longer period, you might need to add more wood logs to the burning coals to ensure you keep the required pizza oven temperature. The oven will keep the heat for several hours, gradually decreasing in temperature.
In the event that substantial smoke is observed during start-up from cold, the oven should be used with an authorised fuel or gas lance until the oven’s operating temperature is reached.
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Before thermometers existed, the way of knowing when a wood fired pizza oven has reached the ideal cooking temperature was by looking at the colour of the internal dome.
When the oven is not in use or even when you start a fire, the dome and walls are black in colour. As the pizza oven temperature rises, the dome will turn grey at first and then white in colour, starting from the top of the dome towards the side walls. This is the key temperature point when you can stop adding wood logs, move the burning logs and coals to one side, close the door and flue and start cooking.
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