Why Pizza Aficionados Rave About Masonry Ovens

If you’re someone who truly cares about and appreciates a good-quality pizza, then your mouth probably waters just at the thought of a pizza cooked in a wood-fired stove. While most things related to food are subjective, this is just about as objective as you can get when it comes to talking about taste and flavor—a pizza cooked in a wood fired stove is simply better than other pizzas.

But why exactly is this? What is it about wood stoves in Wausau, WI that make for a better pizza-cooking environment? Here are just a few of the reasons why pizza aficionados swear by wood-fired masonry ovens for their pizza cooking:

• Reach higher temperatures: A wood-fired masonry oven can get much hotter than a conventional oven you’d find in a normal kitchen. Heat radiates from the wood fire and gets spread around the oven, with that heat being absorbed by the brick walls and trapped there. This process can result in baking temperatures of between 570 and 660 degrees Fahrenheit. These higher temperatures are ideal for making pizza.
• Faster cooking: Because of the sheer amount of heat stored inside the dense brick walls of a masonry oven, you’ll be able to cook your pizzas much faster—within two or three minutes in some cases. This is one of the reasons why pizzerias like using wood-fired ovens—they’re able to cook a lot of pizzas in a short amount of time.
• Wood fired flavor: A wood fired brick oven creates a unique, smoky flavor that you will not be able to get out of a standard kitchen oven. In addition, the high temperatures allow for the creation of other flavors that don’t occur when slow cooking a pizza. You’re also able to get the most out of any oils you put on a pizza—because the heat would destroy that oil in the oven, it gets drizzled on as the pizza is complete, providing a more luxurious flavor. Olive oils and truffle oils can truly bring out the flavors of a wood fired pizza in this way.
• Better crust: When you achieve such high temperatures, the radiant heat from the fire combined with the heat that bounces off the walls of the oven crisps the crust quickly, which means rather than the moisture in the dough drying off, it gets sealed up. This results in a crust that has a pleasant crispiness on the outside, but once you bite into it, it is soft and chewy—perfect!
• Crispy toppings: The intense heat of the brick oven doesn’t just seal up the crust—it does the same to the toppings. Because the pizza cooks so quickly, it is able to crisp vegetables and toppings without doing any damage to the nutrients inside those toppings. The cheese also doesn’t burn, but instead gets smoky and has a nice, slightly browned color to it.

For more information about the benefits of using wood stoves in Wausau, WI for your pizza, contact Marcell’s Specialties Inc. today.

Categorised in: Wood Stoves

This post was written by Writer