In this guide, we will walk you through how to build and maintain a wood fire in a traditional wood fired pizza oven so you can make perfect pizzas every time.

Building your pizza oven fire

A proper wood-fired pizza oven will cook a pizza in just a couple of minutes.

A ceramic pizza oven is the best way to hold heat, but any dome-style pizza oven with proper bricks or tiles as a base will work just fine.

To get your pizza to cook in the same time it takes to get a beer out of the fridge, open it and walk back to see how your pizza is coming along (yes this is an accurate measure of time that I can attest to through experience), the oven needs to be at 700°F or more.

The best way of getting to those kinds of temps is to build up a good coal bank, and use hardwood splits to keep the fire burning throughout the cook in your pizza oven.

We have another article that covers the best wood to use in your pizza oven.

You can achieve this in a couple of different ways:

• Use a charcoal chimney to start a full chimney of lump charcoal, then maintain using hardwood splits as per point 6 below.

• Build your coal base from scratch following the instructions below.

Follow these steps to start your pizza oven:

1. Starting with some hardwood kindling about 1″ thick, set up a base layer, running 3-4 sticks parallel to each other, spacing them a couple of inches apart in the middle of your pizza oven.

2. In between your kindling sticks, place a couple of eco-friendly firelighters. Don’t use liquid firestarters or white plastic-looking firestarters, as these will taint the base of your pizza oven with an unpleasant chemical taste, and you’ll be cooking directly on top of them.

3. On top of your base layer, place another layer of kindling perpendicular to the first layer, 3-4 sticks with the same spacing as the first layer.

6. Once the kindling is fully alight, start by using some smaller splits of hardwood firewood (oak is good), and gradually increase the size until 1/4 split (5″ or so thick), and burn until you have a sizable coal base in the center of your pizza oven. You can then maintain with medium-sized chunks of firewood. This process from scratch should take around an hour or so, but is worth the effort.

7. Once you have a raging hot coal bank, use a long handled poker to push it all to one side of your pizza oven (I also use welding gloves – I learned this the hard way when I singed the hair off my arm the first time!). Building in the center will ensure your fire bricks get nice and hot, enabling the base of your pizza to cook and crisp up nicely. When your coal base is pushed to the side, flames will roll up and across the top of your oven, so you’ll get heat coming from the side and top to cook your pizza perfectly, melting the cheese quickly and ensuring the base doesn’t burn while your cheese not melted.

Throughout this process, make sure that the vents on your chimney stack are fully open for maximum airflow and to ensure a hot, clean burn.

If you have a door on your pizza oven, open the vents if you want to use it, but watch that you’re not smothering the fire. I leave my door completely off or have it ajar halfway open.