Curing a wood-fired pizza oven

If you are thinking of buying or building a pizza stove to bake pizza at home, there is one extremely important factor that you need to consider. A traditional pizza oven made of clay or brick is prone to cracking, leading to burnt or undercooked pizzas. If the cracks get large enough or develop in vital areas, your pizza oven could even completely collapse. To minimize this risk, when your oven is first built, it must go through a process called “curing.”

Curing a pizza oven is a long process. First, you need to let your oven dry for only a week. Starting a fire to dry your oven faster will cause cracks. If you live in a humid climate, you may want to wait longer. Once this is done, you should spend another five days making a fire and maintaining a constant temperature for at least 8 hours a day, the longer the better. Start at 150ºC the first day, then increase by 10ºC every day thereafter. This gradual increase in temperature “hardens” your oven and accustoms it to the heat.

Only solid woods can be used to cure an oven. You can’t use charcoal, chipped wood, or cheesy woods like pine. No liquid of any kind, such as lighter fluid or gasoline, can be used to start the fire. Water cannot be used to extinguish fire.

Unfortunately, I have heard too many stories of people who cured their wood burning oven by implicitly following the instructions, yet it still cracked. Despite the fact that the cracks did not appear immediately, due to the constant temperature changes in the weather outside, the amazing wood-fired pizza oven is constantly expanding and contracting, causing cracks.

An alternative to a clay or brick wood-fired oven is a stainless steel wood-fired oven. The floor of this oven has 30mm thick refractory bricks, not unlike a traditional wood burning pizza stove. A stainless steel exterior means your oven is waterproof, so you don’t have to run off with a tarp when it rains. One of the best benefits of a stainless steel oven is that it does not crack and therefore does not require curing. You can literally take it out of the box, assemble it, and start cooking delicious pizzas the same day.

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