Step Three of Three
Managing the Fire
A wood-fired oven isn’t a hotter home oven. It’s a different instrument, and it cooks by three kinds of heat at once. Learn to read it and you’ll get leopard spots. Ignore it and you’ll get a burnt bottom and a raw top in about ninety seconds.
Three heats, working at once
Conduction is the stone against the base — that’s your crisp and your char. Radiation is the dome glowing down onto the top of the pie, and it’s what melts the cheese and blisters the rim. Convection is the flame rolling across the ceiling, dragging hot air over everything.
Every problem you’ll have comes from these three falling out of balance. Base burning before the cheese melts? Stone too hot relative to the dome. Top browning while the base stays pale? The opposite — you fired hard recently and heated the dome without giving the stone time to recover. Once you think in those terms, troubleshooting stops being guesswork.
Building and holding the fire
01
Burn kiln-dried hardwood, and nothing else
Kiln-dried oak splits. Not softwood, which spits resin and coats everything in sooty smoke. Not green or seasoned-outdoors wood, which carries enough moisture that half your fire’s energy goes into boiling it off instead of heating the stone. Split them small — wrist-thick or less — because small wood gives you the tall, fast flame that a pizza bake actually needs.
02
Give it a full hour, and saturate the stone
Build the fire in the centre of the floor and let it burn there for the first half hour. That’s the part people skip. Heating the dome takes minutes; heating the mass of the stone all the way through takes far longer, and a stone that’s merely hot on the surface will dump its heat into the first pie and leave you cold for the second.
Once the dome has gone from black with soot to clean white, the oven is telling you it’s arrived. Push the fire to one side, add a split or two, and let it settle for another twenty minutes while the floor evens out.
03
Check the floor with an infrared thermometer
Don’t guess, and don’t trust the dial on the door — it reads air, not stone, and the two are nowhere near each other. Point the infrared gun at the spot where the pizza will actually land.
For a wheat Neapolitan pie you’d want the floor screaming, up around 850–900°F. Gluten-free crust wants it lower — somewhere in the region of 700–750°F. There’s no gluten structure to protect the base and the starches colour much faster, so at true Neapolitan temperatures you’ll have a black underside before the top has done anything at all. If the floor is running hot, sweep the fire back and wait, or slide a cold stone in for a few minutes to pull the temperature down.
04
Keep a rolling flame, not a bonfire
What you want during the bake is a modest flame licking along the dome and curling forward over the top of the oven. That rolling tongue of fire is doing the work on the surface of your pizza. A roaring fire heats the dome far past the stone and scorches the rim before the base is ready; no flame at all leaves you with a hot box that bakes rather than blisters.
Feed it one small split at a time, between pies rather than during them.
05
Turn every 20–30 seconds
The side of the pizza facing the fire cooks several times faster than the side facing the door. Leave it still and you get one black edge and one pale one. Lift with the perforated turning peel and give it a quarter turn every twenty to thirty seconds — a small, unhurried movement, keeping the pie near the same spot on the floor.
At 700–750°F a par-baked gluten-free pie needs roughly three to four minutes with three or four turns. That’s longer than a Neapolitan bake, and it should be — you’re building colour gently instead of flash-charring.
No wood-fired oven? Use the steel.
Everything on this site works in a home oven too, and a baking steel gets you closer than you’d think. Put the steel on a rack in the upper third and preheat at maximum — 550°F for most ovens — for a full forty-five minutes. Steel is worth the money over stone here: it moves heat into the base far faster, which is exactly what a domestic oven is otherwise bad at.
Par-bake as usual, top the base, then bake for six to eight minutes and finish under the broiler for the last minute or two to blister the top. You won’t get true leopard spotting, but you’ll get a genuinely crisp base and a properly browned rim — and nobody at your table will be disappointed.
Peter’s Rule
“If the stone isn’t at temperature, nothing else you do matters.”
Every failed pie I’ve made came down to an impatient fire. Give the oven a full hour, check the stone with an infrared thermometer, and the dough will forgive almost everything else.
Now go make some pizza
That’s the whole process — dough, launch, fire. Start with the pies I make most, and come back to these three guides whenever something goes sideways.
Back to Step One: The Dough and Step Two: Shaping & Launching, or browse all guides.