If you’re fortunate enough to have an outdoor pizza oven, it is important to know the time necessary to heat it up. This will depend on the size of your oven. It can take anywhere from 15-30 minutes for a small oven and 30-60 minutes for a larger one.
You’ll also need to keep in mind that wood fires take longer than gas or electric ovens.
What is an Outdoor Pizza Oven?
Outdoor pizza ovens have, over time, become more suitable options for pizza cooking when compared to the typical indoor ovens. An outdoor pizza oven can reach temperatures exceeding 900°F, in contrast to indoor ovens that max out at around 600°F. The higher temperature range implies you can make more pizza varieties, with each bearing its respective defining features.
Outdoor pizza ovens can be fuelled by gas, wood, or charcoal. It all comes down to personal preference and the cost implication of the fuel. The typical operation mechanism involves burning fuel to generate enough heat energy to heat up the oven’s interior. However, the highlight is that the ovens are designed for heat retention.
Recently, we have seen these ovens become more compact, more effective, and more affordable. Additionally, they come in several sizes, and you shouldn’t have a problem owning one if you have limited space.
Outdoor Pizza Oven Tips
Just before we get to the heat-up time of outdoor pizza ovens, let’s discuss some helpful tips to improve your outdoor pizza-making experience.
Stability
This is one of the most important things to consider when situating your oven. Ensure that the surface on which the oven stands is flat and sufficiently stable. Furthermore, check the balance and stability as it will become unsafe to move when high temperatures have been attained.
Use an Oven Thermometer
Like with most kitchen appliances, you get more familiar with repeated use. Use an oven thermometer to get a real sense of the cooking temperature and heat-up time. Quite naturally, you should progressively understand your oven over the first months of use, right until you can accurately estimate the cooking temperature and required preheating time relating to the temperature settings display of the oven (if it has one).
Have a Wire Brush and Peel Around
Maintenance is a big part of oven usage, and a wire brush is one of the most significant pieces of cleaning equipment. It would help if you had it to remove embers and dirt from the firing space. Endeavor to clean before and after each use. Also, it would help if you had a peel nearby whenever you use the oven.
Distribute Heat Evenly
This is particularly important in charcoal and wood ovens. You need to ensure that the wood burns relatively evenly for as long as you need to cook. Furthermore, it would be best to push some of the burning embers to the right and left whenever you notice the embers smoldering. What you want is a little flame burning on the embers always.
However, you want to avoid excessive smoke in the oven, so you should keep the burning flames at bay.
Cooldown the oven
As outdoor ovens can reach higher temperatures than kitchen ovens, you are more likely to burn your food when they get too hot. You can administer a quick test to determine if it is safe or not to put your dough in the oven. Throw a handful of flour into the oven; if it catches fire or burns black immediately, open the oven to cool it down for 15 to 20 minutes before putting it in the dough.
Turning the Pizza
If you hope to get evenly-cooked pizzas with the right level of crispiness, you ought to turn the dough occasionally. You’ll need a pizza popper or turner to turn occasionally so that you can get consistent cooking throughout the pizza.
Cleaning the oven
Wood and charcoal ovens require more cleaning effort than gas ovens. Nonetheless, always leave the oven to cool down fully before you attempt to clean. Clean out the ash with a rake or brush. It may not be very safe to scrape with abrasive materials if you have to clean out baked-on food. A soft, damp rag is sufficient if you have a metal oven. Brick ovens should not be cleaned with water.
How Long Does it Take for an Outdoor Pizza Oven to Heat Up?
Several factors combine to influence the heat-up time of an outdoor pizza oven. On average, it would take at least one and a half hours to reach normal pizza cooking temperature. Some of the other factors that affect heat-up time are:
Oven Size
While it is relative to some other factors like fuel type and the burning rate, the size of an oven affects how long it takes to heat up fully. The larger an oven is, the longer it will take to heat up fully at the constant fuel consumption rate. With wood and charcoal ovens, you hasten the temperature rise by burning more fuel quantity.
Fuel Type
Charcoal, gas, and wood all burn at different rates to produce different heat intensities. For example, wood burns faster than charcoal and will typically heat up an oven faster than charcoal. Gas also burns fast but is not commonly used in pizza ovens.
Oven Material
Brick and metal are two of the commonest outdoor pizza oven materials. However, they have different levels of heat conductivity and retention. Brick ovens have been impossible to replace in heat retention and insulation. They do take longer to heat up, though. On the other hand, metal ovens tend to heat up faster, but they do not retain heat as much as brick ovens.
Outdoor Pizza Ovens – FAQs
It takes an average of 3 hours for a gas-fired pizza oven to heat up. This is because the oven is not already heated, so the burner must first preheat the oven. So if your oven is not heating at all or is heating too slowly, try turning it on for a few minutes before you use it. If this doesn’t work, turn it off and wait another hour before trying again.
It is possible that a pizza oven can be too hot. This is especially the case when the oven has been set to cook at too high of a temperature or if there are no vents for excess heat. Such circumstances can cause the pie crust to dry out, preventing it from becoming crispy and flaky. But, an insufficiently heated oven will not produce the desired crispy crust either.
When you first start using a brick oven, it can take some time to heat up. The amount of time varies on the oven type, the bricks, and the ambient temperature. Generally, for a pizza oven that is new or has been unused for a few years, it can take up to 20 minutes for the oven to reach cooking temperatures of 800°F.
Conclusion
If you plan to get an outdoor pizza oven or just wondering how long it takes to heat one up to a temperature perfect for making pizza, hopefully, we have answered your question.
In this post, we have covered several factors that can affect heat-up time. Nevertheless, we advise that you use an oven temperature to get a more accurate reading of an oven’s internal temperature at all times.
