Il Circolo del Forno
Dear friend of good food, today I want to take you on a journey through flames and electric heating elements to finally debunk those tales we hear every time we sit down in front of a steaming round pizza. How many times have you walked into a pizzeria, seen that beautiful crackling wood-fired oven in the corner, and thought that only there, only thanks to that ancient fire, can pizza have that magical taste from the past? It’s a romantic, almost poetic image that warms our hearts even before our stomachs. But what if I told you that much of what we believe about the relationship between wood and flavor is actually a beautiful paper castle built on memories and not on the reality of things?
The Physics of Heat: Three Ways to Bake a Pizza
Let’s get comfortable and try to look at what really happens inside that hot brick shell, whether it’s fueled by a log of beech or a powerful metal heating element. To understand how a pizza bakes, we need to stop thinking about cooking as a mysterious art and start seeing it for what it really is: a marvelous play of physical and thermodynamic balances. Don’t be scared by the big words, because nature is much simpler than the technicians want us to believe.
Imagine for a moment that you are in the kitchen stirring your hot tea with a metal spoon. After a few moments, you will feel the handle of the spoon warming up under your fingers. There, you’ve just experienced conduction. It’s the heat that moves through direct contact between two bodies. In our oven, conduction occurs between the stone on which we place the pizza and the base of the dough. If the stone is too hot or conducts heat too quickly, the pizza burns underneath before it cooks on top. If, however, we use a material that retains heat but releases it gently, like the famous clay biscuit, we will have an even cooking even at very high temperatures.
Next, there’s convection. Think about when you add a bit of cold milk to hot tea: the two masses mix and reach an equilibrium. In the oven, the air moves exactly like a fluid, as if it were water. The warm air rises, and the cooler air descends, creating small invisible vortices that envelop our pizza. If we could look inside the oven with magic glasses, we would see air flows similar to sea currents caressing the crust, making it puff up.
Finally, there’s radiation, which is perhaps the most fascinating part. It’s the heat you feel on your face when you sit in the sun on a winter day, or what emanates from the car when its hood has been under the summer sun. Every object that has a temperature emits heat in the form of invisible radiation. In a wood-fired oven, this heat comes from the flame, but be careful: it also comes from the bricks of the vault that, once heated, continue to radiate heat even after the flame has died down.