We all know that you can cook amazing and perfectly-crusted pizzas in a wood fired pizza oven.
It’s in the name. But did you know that you can also cook everything from meat to vegetables and bread to desserts in a pizza oven? Wood fired pizza ovens are incredibly versatile and will completely transform your backyard cooking experiences once you find and master a few recipes.
Almost anything that you can make in your regular oven or on a grill can be made even tastier in a wood fired pizza oven.
Meat
Whether you are craving rib-eye steak, barbecue ribs, roast lamb or roast chicken, you can use your wood fired pizza oven to cook almost any meat you desire. If you think your meat is good off the barbecue grill, wait until you try it after you’ve cooked it in a wood fired pizza oven. Cooking in a wood fired pizza oven can add some extra smoky flavour and just a little more crunch to the outside of your cuts of meat. Barbecue ribs are a particularly popular thing to cook in a pizza oven and can be perfectly cooked in as little as 40 minutes.
Vegetables
As your mother always said, don’t forget your vegetables. And vegetables never tasted as good as they do out of a wood fired pizza oven. Potatoes, cauliflower, pumpkin, capsicum, broccoli, carrots, eggplant, onions, mushrooms and corn on the cob – among many more vegetables – can all be easily roasted in a wood fired pizza oven. Some vegetables are best to expose to the flame – like corn on the cob – while others are best to simply be roasted with some separation from the fire. Either way, if you do it right your vegetables will be a major hit with your dinner guests. For the ultimate side dish, try cooking some thinly-sliced potato chips in your wood fired pizza oven.
Bread
Bread has been cooked in wood fired ovens for centuries – well before new homes came complete with German-made stainless steel electric ovens. Cooking bread with fire is the way it was meant to be cooked and delivers some great taste and perfectly crispy crusts. You can cook things like garlic bread and naan bread at the same time you are cooking pizzas, given those flat breads can be cooked at a similar high temperature. Most other breads should be cooked in your wood fired oven at between 200 and 230 degrees Celsius, which will require you to let your oven cool down a little bit first. Traditional breads like Sourdough, Ciabatta, Baguettes, Focaccia and rolls all come out great when cooked in a wood fired pizza oven.
Desserts
What’s the best way to finish a pizza night? With a dessert pizza, of course! There are all sorts of tasty dessert pizza recipes out there, from caramel and apple to Nutella, cinnamon roll and cookies and cream. You can even cook non-pizza desserts like brownies, carrot cakes, roast apples and roast pineapples. The cooking possibilities really are endless with a wood fired pizza oven.