Once the oven is hot, we are not always burning wood. When we reach the right temperature the addition of fresh wood will increase the heat, not what we want. The level of smoke diminishes without active wood burning. To solve this problem we have added sawdust to our arsenal. I first witnessed the saw dust in the wood fired oven technique at Una Pizza Napoletana. Anthony Mangieri puts a peel-full of wood shavings into the oven right before firing his pies. This intrigued me. It made sense. Since we want the wood smoke to permeate what we cook we needed to add something combustible to create smoke without generating excess heat. The addition of small doses of wood shavings, hickory saw dust, quickly smolder into whispers of smoke filling the oven and flavoring the food.
Years Past
