How To Bake Bread in a Wood Burning Oven

A Wood-fired oven is a great cooking tool when you get a handle on the way it works. Cooking with wood infuses food with rich flavour and allows you to develop your baking skills.

To make good bread, you must find the right chemistry between the bread size, the baking time, the temperature and the humidity of the oven. Let’s consider baking breads of different sizes:

Size of Loaf

If you bake a 1kg loaf

• Increase the oven humidity
• Delay the bake until the temperature drops to 210°C
• Lengthen cooking time until the bread is well done in the middle, wetting the oven floor with a damp cloth a few minutes before baking.Delay the bake until the temperature drops to 210°C

If you bake a 5kg loaf

• No need to humidify the oven because the excess steam could form a very thin crumbly crust.
• Bake at a higher temperature (around 220°C).
• Shorten baking time and don’t hydrate the oven floor to delay the hardening of the crust.

General Tips

bread is baked in a wood-fired oven after the embers are cleared of the floor with the door ajar. This results in the temperature going down slowly and steadily.

Cook some pizzas at 450°C to start the party and then bake the bread when the temp drops down to 220°C. After making homemade bread, make sure to cool it properly to keep it in tip-top shape.For example, put the bread onto a cooling rack resting on four upside-down glasses to avoid that residual moisture condenses into the crumb making it soggy and sponge-like.

Cooking with an Alfa Forni Wood-Fired Oven

Cooking with a wood-fired oven demands a trial-and-error approach needing continuous tweaking until you know the oven inside out.

If you’re considering a new oven, why not consider a high-performance Alfa Forni? They can bake bread as well as pizza, and can optimise cooking time and consumption thanks to the fast heating steel dome.

With models such as the compact Ciao, the huge Allegro and the bigmouthed 4 Pizze, Alfa provides an oven for every cooking need.