Balancing Oven Dome and Floor Temperature

Every pizza oven is a little bit unique in how it absorbs and stores heat and how it cooks. That means that you always have to do a little bit of experimenting with a new oven (or a friends oven, or an oven at your vacation rental house) to work out how to be fire your oven and make it just right for the type of cooking that you are going to be doing — baking, roasting, grilling, pizza, etc.

I’ve been working with my prototype Presto oven (though we are going to be changing the name when we introduce the product) and I am really getting to know it. One of the issues I am working on with my new oven is balancing dome and floor heat. Unlike a larger oven, where the challenge can, at times, be keeping the cooking floor hot, in a smaller oven, because the fire itself spreads over a larger part of the cooking floor, I am finding that the floor is hotter than the dome.

To address this situation, I have started raking the coals toward the outside of the floor after the fire burns down. I keep the heat in the oven, without overheating the center of the cooking floor — where it can burn the bottom of my bread.

If you have trouble with your dishes cooking faster on the bottom than the top, you can try this technique.