There’s always an element of experimentation to wood-fired cooking, and learning to produce great results from a wood fire can be fun and rewarding. But due to how these three ovens were designed, it wasn’t always fun, and the results were often not worth the prolonged effort. The small fuel chambers limited us to small fires that had to be monitored constantly. The cooking surfaces did eventually reach upwards of 700 degrees, as they did when heated by the propane burners, but we struggled to maintain those temperatures. At one point, a robust flame died in the time it took one of our testers to stretch and top a pizza, which couldn’t have been more than 90 seconds. These models really required two people: one to maintain the fire, and one to prepare and monitor the pizzas. Even in large professional ovens, pizzas cook too quickly for them to pick up any wood-fired flavor. Since you're not choosing wood for flavor, there’s no real incentive to use wood as fuel in these ovens when gas is such an easy, clean, and reliable option. All in all, using wood was a frustrating, high-maintenance affair with little payoff.
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