If you follow us on social media, you'll know we recently launched three of our pizza oven products in 24 Blue Diamond Garden Centres across the country. This is a HUGE deal for our business and we're very grateful to Blue Diamond for working with us to make this happen!
Blue Diamond approached us because they wanted pizza oven fuel to sell alongside their own brand Thor pizza oven, which runs on wood pellets and hardwood kindling. I'd never used the Thor or even any similar oven such as the Woody Oven or the Alfresco Chef Ember, so I popped down to my local centre and bought one of these little ovens, which at the time was retailing at just £239 - quite a lot cheaper than any other pizza oven we own - so I was really excited to put it through its paces and see what I could produce.
I lit the oven the day before to get a feel for the temperature management, before making up a batch of dough and coming back the next day to light up the oven and bake some pizza.
Cooking Neapolitan Pizzas in the Thor Pizza Oven
How do I make pizza dough like yours?
Using high quality pizza flour makes a huge difference, this dough was made with the very high quality Sonata Pizza Flour from Wrights Flour. That said, for me producing great pizza dough mostly comes down to the method of dough making. You can read and watch all about it in our dough blogs, below.
How do I get my pizza oven hot enough?
We understand how frustrating this can be - your dough is ready, your family is waiting, and you're struggling to get your oven hot enough to bake pizza! Our top tips are below for lighting small wood fired wood fired ovens:
1) Make sure your fuel is dry enough - wood under 20% moisture burns hotter and cleaner
2) Oxygen is just as important as fuel, make sure you don't overload your fuel tray and allow plenty of airflow
3) You need your door on, your fuel hatch lid closed and your chimney vent, if your oven has one, wide open
4) Check your fuel tray every 3-4 minutes and top up if necessary - sometimes it's easier for one person to fuel the oven while the other bakes the pizzas
5) Wood pellets provide very high heat, hardwood kindling burns for longer to give a longer-lasting base base heat for less topping up - combined they work perfectly together!
What wood should I use in my pizza oven?
You should only ever use hardwood kindling - softwood may be cheaper but it will burn through quickly, might struggle to get your oven to temperature and will leave behind a lot of excess ash. Our hardwood kindling is made from sustainable British oak.
When it comes to pellets, extensive research showed us that softwood pellets burn hotter and with less ash than hardwood, so our pizza oven wood pellets are made from sustainable British softwoods.
Make sure all the wood you use in your pizza oven is dried to well below 15% moisture so it burns hot, clean and with minimal smoke.
What you need to light the Thor pizza oven
- Hardwood kindling
- Pizza oven pellets
- Two firelighters
- Extra long matches
- Infrared thermometer
- Heat proof gloves
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Related product
Pizza Oven Hardwood Kindling
£37.95