How to Light Your Wood Fired Pizza Oven

Through plenty of trial and error (alright, more error than we'd like to admit) we know that getting your wood fired pizza oven up to temperature, and keeping it there, can be a challenge.

We struggled to find the best logs for a pizza oven, so we designed our pizza sticks to make this part of the process a little easier. Processed to 50mm thickness or less, our pizza sticks light without kindling and burn hot and fast, getting your oven up to temperature much quicker. Let's show you how to use them most effectively...

You're going to build a fire right on the cooking surface of your oven. This heats the stones, which is what's going to cook and crisp your base while the rolling flame adds flavour and cooks through your toppings.

Start with a couple of firelighters right where you're going to cook your pizzas.

Use pizza sticks to create a base for the fire, and build a lattice from 6-8 sticks, depending on the size of your oven.

Time to light this baby up! Make sure your firelighters sit under the criss-crossed parts of the tower. Once you have a fire burning, add a few more pizza sticks every 3-4 minutes.

After 10-12 minutes, depending on the size of your oven, it should be up to temperature or getting pretty close. Keep the fire stoked for the next 3-4 minutes and keep the heat right where it is on the pizza stone.

After about 13 or 14 minutes, push the fire to the back or side of your oven using your ember rake, and add two of the larger logs from your pizza pack using your pizza peel. We add our heat deflector in at this point too.

As soon as the two bigger logs have taken, you're ready to cook and your oven will sustain cooking temperature for up to 20 minutes depending on the size and make of oven. If you're just cooking a couple of pizzas you won't need to add any more logs, but if you're cooking for an extended period of time, just keep adding larger logs to the fire to maintain temperature and keep that amazing rolling flame going.

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