Ask any traditional Italian pizzaiola and they’ll tell you that the only authentic way to cook pizza is in a wood-fired oven. There’s no denying wood-fired ovens produce a truly unique product, but there’s several reasons why it isn’t always practical to make such a large investment when you’re thinking about opening a pizza shop or simply adding pizza to an existing menu. Today we’ll take a look at why an electric deck oven might be a more reasonable alternative. First, let’s discuss the advantages of wood-fired ovens.
The Benefits of Wood-Fire
Cook Time
Depending on the amount of toppings, a pizza might take up to five minutes to cook in an electric deck oven. A wood-fired oven might do the same pizza in less than 90 seconds, though the cook time will depend on many factors.
Taste
Because it cooks at a much higher temperature, a wood-fired oven will produce a crispier crust with a satisfying crunch. This is often actually where the ‘smoky’ flavour of a wood-fired pizza comes from: most of the smoke produced by the flames flows across the ceiling and doesn’t come into contact with the pizza.
So taste and cook time are the key reasons why you might consider investing in a wood-fired oven. What other factors might influence your decision, and prompt you to consider an electric deck oven as an alternative?
Electric Deck Ovens: A Smarter Choice?
Time and Expertise
Making great pizza using a wood-fired oven requires time and training. Before even beginning to cook you’ll need to build a large fire to heat the entire chamber. Once a suitable temperature has been reached, you’ll need to rake the coals to the side and clean the floor of the oven. Even then, you’ll still need to add wood at regular intervals to maintain temperature.
With an electric deck oven, you simply turn it on and wait, on average, around 20 minutes for the oven to reach temperature. Staff will still need to know how long a pizza needs to cook and regularly check on it while it’s cooking, but any team member can be trained to do this.
Wood-fired cooking requires expertise, and if your pizzaiola is sick or away from work things can quickly get out of hand in the kitchen. It happens more often that you’d think, always with disastrous results.
Bonus Tip: Wood-fired cooking can take years or even decades to perfect. A pizzaiola needs to understand not only how long to cook a pizza for, but when and where to shift pizzas away from the direct flames during cooking to avoid burning. A burnt pizza is disappointing regardless of how it was cooked, and looks especially bad when it’s supposed to be coming from an authentic wood-fired oven.
Maintenance & Compliance
Wood-fired ovens require an exhaust system that must be cleaned regularly (at least four times per year). In most cases the duct and fan system must be independent and separate from any other cooking equipment too, so if you’re adding a pizza oven to an existing kitchen setup, expect considerable headaches trying to install a wood-fired system. Even worse, some local councils may legally require you to also install an electrostatic filter or smoke hog to remove any ash or soot before the smoke reaches your exhaust system. Satisfying all these requirements can end up costing substantially more than the oven itself.
Smaller electric deck ovens don’t usually need an exhaust system if they're below a 7.9kW threshold. Larger models are frequently supplied with an exhaust hood accessory that can be easily fitted, like the one below.
Space Limitations
Wood-fired ovens do vary in size, but generally speaking they take up a larger amount of space. Add the required exhaust system and one could quickly take over your kitchen. Unless you’re trying to impress your Italian grandparents you can get very similar results from an electric deck oven, and they’re available in a wide variety of sizes and capacities to suit any application. We’ve got models that will fit on a benchtop and larger, stackable models that make use of vertical space to save on your kitchen footprint.
Output
Depending on the size, a wood-fired oven might cook up to 10 pizzas at the same time. That’s not a bad number, and with the lower cooking time it might sound reasonable for a small to medium sized venue but consider this: the King 9 electric deck oven cooks up to 9 pizzas, and can be stacked up to 3 decks high for a total of 27 pizzas cooking at the same time. The front door of a deck oven is also generally the full width of the machine, so it’s a lot easier to load pizzas in and out and to check on them while they’re cooking.
Control
With a wood-fired oven you have very little control over the amount of heat hitting your pizzas from the top and bottom, and you’ll need to be constantly manipulating the wood supply, exhaust, door openings and pizza positioning.
Compare this to an electric deck oven like the GAM King that allows you to adjust the amount of heat coming from the top and bottom of the chamber, ensuring consistent cooking every time. The control panel on the King also provides easy access to exhaust settings, cooking times and preheating, and can even switch the oven to an economy mode to save on power consumption when business is quiet.
An added benefit of electric deck ovens is the bottom heat control. With a wood-fired oven, all the heat comes from above and around the pizza. Electric decks have a heating element under the stone base that helps to draw the moisture out of the dough, creating a consistent crunchy base. This can be done in a wood-fired oven, but as mentioned earlier it needs a much higher level of expertise to get right.
Economy
Once you’ve decided to fire up a wood-fired oven there’s no going back, so even if you’re having a quiet night you’ll need to keep feeding it fuel to maintain the internal temperature. Even if you only serve a couple of customers, you’ll be investing the same amount in time and fuel as you would be when you’re doing a roaring trade.
Electric deck ovens can be ready to cook in as little as 20 minutes from the time you turn them on. Many models include an economy mode feature so you can save on energy consumption when things are quiet, then heat the oven back up to cooking temperature within minutes when you’re ready to cook a pizza.
Replicating Wood-Fire?
The way the final pizza is cooked is undoubtedly the most desirable aspect of cooking in a wood-fired oven. What if there was a way to replicate that flavour in a stone deck oven? GAM King electric deck ovens do just that with the I.W.O.S. system. Standing for “Italian Wood Oven Substitute”, this system approximates the air flow of a wood-fired oven, circulating air around the pizza to produce an impressive baking result.
Bonus: Shelf Life
There’s no denying that a pizza cooked in a wood-fired oven has a unique character and ‘look’ straight from the oven, but the trade-off of cooking at such a high temperature is that it will lose these qualities as it cools. A pizza cooked at a lower temperature will have more moisture in it, stay closer to its ‘fresh from the oven’ texture longer and will re-heat better. If you’re just serving sit-down patrons in a standard restaurant setting this won’t make much difference to you, but if you offer take-out or delivery options this might be something worth considering.
In Conclusion
There’s no doubt you can cook delicious pizzas in a wood-fired oven, but the results aren’t guaranteed and require a considerable investment of time, effort and money. Electric deck ovens are an economical alternative that are not only easy to set up and operate, but can produce consistent, predictable results every time with little to no maintenance required.
