A clay pizza oven needs to be pre-heated with a good hot fire for about two hours prior to baking.
Prepare the Wood for The Fire in the Clay Oven
Clay ovens work by soaking up heat from the fire in the thick walls of the oven, and radiating the heat back for hours after the fire has been raked out. To build a hot fire, use wood cut in about one foot lengths, cured, (dried for at least a season), and chopped into kindling sized pieces about two fingers wide. Hard wood burns the hottest, but any wood will do. Tree prunings work well, as long as larger pieces are split. Scrap wood from building projects can also be used, but do not use treated or painted wood.
Build the Fire on the Oven Floor
Start the fire in the middle of of the oven floor. Start with crumpled balls of paper, and small sticks laid over the paper teepee style. As the fire catches, add the larger wood. Tending the fire is perhaps the most tedious part of the baking process, but someone needs to stay by the oven to continually add fuel to the fire and keep it steadily burning hot and clean. The fire and hot coals should cover most of the oven floor.
Create a Draft for a hot fire
The basic clay oven has no chimney. To make the fire draw well and burn hot, some bakers create a chimney effect by placing a piece of sheet metal across the oven door, raised up from the oven floor a couple of inches to create a gap where air can be drawn into the fire, and smoke can escape out the top.
Raking out the Fire and Cleaning the Oven Floor
After about two hours, the oven should be quite hot. Let the fire burn down and out rake the remains into a metal bucket, using a hoe. Wear heavy gloves, sturdy shoes, and use caution as there will be hot embers and coals amid the ashes. Then use a damp--not wet, natural fiber mop, or cloth attached to a stick to swab out the oven floor. The oven floor won’t be hospital clean, but the majority of the ash will be gone. Some bakers object to any ash on their baked products, and put their breads and pizzas on sheets of parchment paper for baking.
Soak the Clay Oven Then Take its Temperature
The heat needs to equalize throughout the oven, so after raking out the fire, put the wooden oven door in place, and wait 10 to 20 minutes. Remove the oven door and measure the temperature of the oven. An ordinary oven thermometer is usually inadequate for this task because they often do not register more than 500 degrees F. A laser thermometer is a rather a dramatic contrast to the rustic clay oven, but they really work well for measuring the oven temperature in various locations. At this stage, the oven will probably be 700 to 800 degrees F.
Building a good hot fire and maintaining it for a couple hours is essential for heating the walls and floor of a clay oven. Once the oven is hot, and the heat is equalized, it can be used for several hours to bake a variety of breads, pizzas, pies, and to roast meats and vegetables, in the order of their temperature needs.
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