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Many locally-owned gourmet pizza shops can charge a premium for their pizzas over large multi-national pizza chains. Why? Their pizzas are often cooked in wood-fired pizza ovens rather than fast-cooking electric ovens and therefore taste far better. With pizzas, it’s less about the ingredients used and more about the cooking process. How a pizza is cooked can be the difference between a “yeah, it’s pretty good” and “wow, that’s amazing” meal. If you cooked two identical pizzas in an electric oven and a wood-fired pizza oven, you would notice a distinct difference in texture and taste between the two. Using wood-fired ovens is the traditional way of cooking pizza, which originated from Italy more than 1000 years ago. Here are five reasons why cooking with a wood-fired pizza oven today remains the superior option.

Pizza is evenly-cooked

Wood-fired pizza ovens deliver an even temperature distribution, which means every piece of every pizza inside is cooked to perfection. As long as you maintain the right temperature in the oven, you won’t have to worry about any hot or cold sections of your pizza – which will be ideally heated from every angle.

Crispier crusts

The high heat generated from a wood-fired pizza oven helps deliver pizza crusts that can’t be beaten. If prepared properly, crusts come out with a crispier outer shell but are puffy and soft inside – the perfect combination. Your pizza will also be well cooked and crispy on the bottom from the hot stone it sits on underneath.

Smoky flavour

Cooking in a wood-fired pizza oven delivers an extra kick of smoky flavour to your tastebuds.

As you’d expect, because the oven has burning wood inside, the pizza absorbs a little bit of the smokiness. This is especially true in brick wood-fired pizza ovens, which are considered to be by far the best ovens to cook a pizza in.

Quicker cooking

Given the high heat generated in wood-fired pizza ovens, you can cook your food much faster than is possible with a standard electric or gas oven. Once you have your wood-fired pizza oven at the ideal cooking temperature, your pizzas should only take a few brief minutes to cook. A standard consumer kitchen oven may take up to 10 times longer to cook the same pizza. Wood-fired pizza ovens will have you and your guests enjoying a meal together in a far more timely fashion.

Healthier pizza

Because pizza cooks faster in a wood-fired pizza oven, toppings better hold not only their flavour but also their natural nutrients. The high heat means the pizza crust cooks much more quickly and therefore you do not have to leave the pizza in longer and risk over-cooking, drying out or even burning the toppings to a blackened crisp. Many vegetables loose some nutrients when cooked and generally lose more the longer they are exposed to heat. This includes popular pizza toppings like onion, mushroom, spinach and capsicum. By using a wood-fired pizza oven, you can avoid over-cooking these toppings and losing more nutrients than you need to. More flavourful and healthier pizzas? At Sydney Fire Bricks, we call that a win-win!

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