I finished building a cupola oven and finding me burning the pizza bottoms constantly. If I pull the pies earlier they aren’t completely cook.
I already make small personal size pies and I think I can’t make my dough much thinner.
The oven gets nicely hot, the floor is around 800 when I push the embers back and start baking.
My dough is just flour, water, salt and yeast.
Yesterday I used Cento Anna Napoletana tipo OO. Those pies really burned quickly.
Open to all suggestions.
Let the floor temp reduce to about 600, then build up your fire at the back of the oven to energetic burning. It sounds like the trouble you’re having is too hot oven floor and not enough heat in the walls of the oven.
Just my .02
Rotate your pizzas while they bake. They should not sit in one place. A “banjo” pizza peel (smaller round head) is a great tool for this purpose.
Thanks for the suggestion. I did rotate. Just saw your movie in the Dropbox. My pies sauce and cheese didn’t bubble at all. So I presume the floor was too hot and the overall oven to “cold”.
Let us know how any adjustments you make work out. @gdiscenza’s tip will serve you well. What you saw in the video is happening in part because of the infrared energy from the coal bed in the rear, and partly from the flames reaching up and over your pies.
Also, my experience is that most complaints about regulating the oven are about the floor being too cold, not too hot—so you have built a very good hearth!
What I found there is definitely an art to using this oven.
The oven floor temperature and the oven temperature need to be in balance otherwise you have burn bottoms or uncooked dough.
I currently aim for a floor temp around 600f.
I had to cut the wood I use while actually baking in smaller pieces. Prior I was lumping to big a piece of wood on the fire, they wouldn’t give much instant heat to the oven temperature.
Now I work with 1-1.5 diameter pieces, they instantly catch fire and add to the temp.
As I am learning the craft, I also reduce the size of my pies. This gives me more tries in my trail and errors while feeding friends and family. Two large pies would only give me two tries on night. 4 smaller ones allows me to tweak 4 times one night.
As anyone tried the effects of using steam, I haven’t tried it yet just thinking of what might it do.