Hi I'm Rhiannon from Barbecue Spit Rotisseries and today I'm
going to show you How to light a fire in a wood-fired pizza oven
Now we've all lit a fire in our normal fireplace at home and lighting a fire inside a wood fired
pizza oven is pretty much the same thing. The couple of essentials that you'll need
to get your fire started starting off with fire lighters. Now I like to use an all-natural fire
lighter and this one that we're using today is basically just made from compressed cardboard
I don't like to use anything like the little white jiffy lighters or anything like that it's
got chemicals in there and my theory is I don't want that anywhere near the food that I'm cooking
now the other important thing that you'll need is some kindling now we all know kindling it's
really thin pieces of wood that catch light easy and that will go on top of our fire lighters.
The next thing that we'll need is some hard wood so I've got some hardwood here
which is about the same length as your forearm and you'll need about four or five pieces of hardwood
now I cannot stress enough how important it is to have dry hardwood now I'm not talking about
the firewood that you can pick up from your local petrol station or anything like that this needs to
be bone dry. So nothing that's been just chopped down from your backyard it needs to have dried for
a minimum of six preferably 12 months. Something like iron bark or red gum will really do the trick
now some other essentials that you will need will be some heat proof gloves ideally ones that cover
up to your elbow as you can imagine this oven is going to be absolutely roaring so the longer the
gloves are the better the other thing you'll need is something to light the fire lighters with so I
like to use these little butane torches but you could also use matches for example. Now you can
imagine once your fire's all lit and it's time to put the pizza in you'll need to move the wood to
the back of the oven and that's when these other tools come in handy so I like to use a stainless
steel scraper which has a nice long handle long enough to reach the back of your oven and the
other essential is some sort of brush because what you'll do is you'll need to sweep the floor of the
pizza oven to remove any salt or rash on there obviously you don't want the the salt and ash to
go into the base of your pizza oven. Now I've run you through all the essentials of what you'll need
to light a fire in your wood fire pizza oven let's go through the way that you start setting it all
up so down the bottom I've used three all natural fire lighters and then on top of that we've
positioned some kindling now I recommend starting off with about five or six pieces of kindling
and you want to allow enough air flow around that not to smother the initial flame then over the
top of the kindling we'll add about four or five pieces of our hardwood the first step is to light
the firelighters now that the fire lighters and kindling is lit we're going to add our hardwood
now as you can see it's very important that you are wearing heatproof gloves
Now the pizza oven that we're cooking with today is the Flaming Coals Premium Pizza Oven and on
the top of the flue there is a baffle plate now I like to have the baffle all the way open for
about the first 15 minutes and what that allows is any resins that may have been on the kindling the
fire lighters or on the hardwood that escapes up through the chimney and expels that way you're not
keeping those contaminants inside your oven where you're going to put your food after 15 minutes
I'll close it off about halfway and then we'll put the door on so the pizza oven can get nice and hot
so the wood's been burning for about 15 minutes so what we're going to do now is put the door on
now I am leaving the door slightly open that way more air can get through and help keep the fire
going. We've had our fire burning for about 20 minutes and as you can see from the dial
we're sitting at about 450 degrees celsius which is my ideal cooking temperature but
anywhere between 400 and 450 will be fine so we'll take the door off and we'll have a peek inside
you can see that the fire has really started to break down and the oven is quite hot including
the bricks what we need to do is make room for the pizza so we're going to get our
pizza brush and our pizza scraper and move the fire to the back of the oven
okay so I've got a nice long handled wood scraper and of course my heatproof gloves
once we have the fire towards the rear of the oven use a brush to sweep the bricks
sweeping the bricks will just help remove any of that residual
ash the other thing that I like to check before putting my pieces in the oven is to check
check the temperature of the stone so using an infrared thermometer will allow you to do that
now i like to aim for a temperature of somewhere between 350 to 400 degrees celsius
and because our fire was so hot and we are sitting at about 395 celsius in this instance.
At this temperature your pizzas will be done in about two to three minutes
so the only thing left to do is to put the pizza in
so this particular pizza oven is quite large so you could cook three
large pizzas in there if you wanted at the same time just by putting the fire
towards one of the back corners me personally I wouldn't be cooking more than two because
as you can see there is quite a bit of work involved to maneuver the pizzas during the cook
so this particular pizza oven is quite well insulated so if after you finish cooking
pizzas you're planning on cooking a roast or a loaf of bread just wait for the temperature
to come down to about between 200 and 220 degrees celsius before putting other food in