Summer is the right season to enjoy your home’s outdoor spaces, to organise lunches and dinners for family and friends and to make good use of cooking equipment like the grill or the wood-burning oven.
If you own a wood-fired oven and you can use it on the terrace or in the garden, then you are really lucky and even more so if you like pizza: using an outdoor oven frees you from structural constraints of home’s interior.
In the kitchens, we find mostly electric ovens that are not up to par for cooking pizzas as they can’t reach the required high temperatures.
In fact, with a reasonable budget you can buy a home oven that bakes a restaurant-quality pizza just as well as a commercial one.
Outdoor ovens are all that you need for your al fresco areas and to climb the learning curve to master the technique of cooking not only pizzas but oodles of other dishes.
In this article, we will list 9 reasons to choose the outdoor Alfa ovens, focusing first on the advantages of cooking with wood and then on the benefits of using our outstanding products.
Why choose an Alfa wood-fired oven for your terrace
Alfa ovens are innovative cooking tools that can deliver great performances even in the domestic environment thanks to the developments in their technology and design.
On this subject, here’s short list of 9 advantages that Alfa wood-fired ovens have, especially when they are operated on a terrace.
The first 4 benefits are about all wood-burning ovens in general:
- Greater satisfaction in cooking
- Perfectly baked pizza
- Perfect cooking of pretty much anything
- They expand your culinary options
The second group of advantages concerns specifically the Alfa steel ovens and their edge over other wood-burning home counterparts that is simply the result of our passion for excellence that we have been pursuing for more than 40 years:
- Great thermal efficiency
- Mobile cooking tools
- Outdoor furniture
- Longer lifespan
- Wide availability
1. Greater satisfaction in cooking
The first big advantage of cooking with a wood-burning oven is surely that it gives tremendous satisfaction to the amateur cook. That’s the psychological aspect related to getting back to the basics of baking food burning firewood.
The ability to tame and control fire was the man’s first invention and was the fundamental driver for human evolution.
Cooking with fire takes back to our roots as a species as it is part of our DNA and doing it well needs a lot of practice to get the hang of the oven and fully understand the properties of fire, wood and food.
2. Perfectly baked pizza
Speaking of our favourite dish, pizza, it can only be baked in a wood-fired oven. The Neapolitan oven is a symbol of Italy abroad and with pizza, born as a poor man’s dish to check the temperature of the oven before baking bread, they go perfectly well together.
Only the wood-burning oven reaches such high temperatures to quickly cook pizza in a healthy way and have an explosion of taste in your mouth at the same time.
3. Perfect cooking of pretty much everything
The features of the wood-fired oven allow you to get a cooking bringing with it a unique, smoky flavour that enhances the taste of each kind of food.
To do this, however, it’s necessary to know how to control the temperature and to be aware of how heat is transferred inside the oven. In the wood-burning oven, heat can travel from one place to another in three ways:
- Conduction (placing food on the hot floor)
- Convection (hot air circulates inside the oven)
- Radiation (the fire cooks the food directly)
To handle the oven temperature and to impart a special aroma to your food, you must know what type of wood to choose and how to deal with the fire to reach the desired temperature.
We can distinguish 5 phases:
- Ignition: to light the fire, place some kindling by adding some small pieces of wood as the fire builds up.
- Heating: add slow-burning large logs to form the embers that help to raise the oven temperature.
- Stability: once your oven has exceeded 400 °C you can start baking, making sure to keep the temp stable by adding medium-size logs.
- Keeping the temp: to maintain the ideal temperature, put the oven door and keep it slightly opened.
- Cooling: let the oven cool slowly with the door closed when you are done with cooking.
4. They expand your culinary options
Using the wood-fired oven opens up a world of cooking possibilities as you can make recipes that you can’t normally do with your electric oven.
In addition to baking Neapolitan pizza that needs a temperature between 450 and 500 °C you can cook any type of bread and this will certainly encourage you to increase the knowledge in the field of baked products, especially of the quality of flours, kneading techniques and fermentation times.
Of course, don’t forget that anything you can make in your regular oven, you can make it way better in a wood-fired oven!
Let’s now list the benefits that are typical of Alfa wood-burning ovens.
5. Great thermal efficiency
Alfa manufactures high-performing ovens with innovative features thanks to the application of state-of-the-art technologies and the most advanced materials.
The most important innovation that we have developed over the last few years is the ForninoxTM , obtained by covering the dome with several layers of stainless steel.
The result is an appliance that heats up faster and reaches a temperature of 450 °C in a few minutes. As a consequence, you need less firewood to have the same heat output.
For a traditional brick oven, it takes at least two to three hours to reach the right temperature for cooking and that makes it very impractical for baking small quantities of food.
Instead, with our steel ovens, you can perfectly cook all the recipes you want in no time.
6. Mobile cooking tools
Steel ovens are great mobile cooking options. Equipped with wheels and very light, they can be easily moved whenever and wherever you want to satisfy all your needs.
7. Outdoor furniture
Alfa ovens come with a design that does improve cooking performances, but they are also a sight to behold.
The stylish steel dome brings to mind traditional brick ovens and its sheen conveys a sense of power and technological prowess leading to excellent cooking results.
These appliances are furnishing solutions that beautify the indoor and outdoor living spaces of your home.
8. Longer lifespan
The great care that Alfa takes in the design and in the choice of the best materials used in the manufacturing of the steel oven is the reason for its long life.
An oven like that is a long-term investment and it will last decades if regularly maintained and cleaned.
9. Wide availability
Alfa’s wide range of ovens is available in many different sizes and fuels and more than suitable for outdoor use.
Our products range from large models like the Allegro that cooks 4/5 pizzas at a time to smaller ones like the One with plenty of options in between.
The One in particular is a technological gem, a perfect fit for people who have little space available but do not want to give up cooking with wood. It reaches 500 °C in just 10 minutes, weighs only 50 kg, has compact dimensions that make it easy to operate it on balconies and terraces and may be powered by gas as well.
Among all our products, you will certainly find the one that best suits your needs. Cook like a professional at home with a high-performance, energy-efficient and aesthetically pleasing oven.
