Ready to cook.

Now that you have properly cured your wood burning brick oven from Chicago Brick Oven, you are ready to start enjoying the food and fun. We have designed our ovens to heat quickly, while maintaining the ability to generate and capture high, intense heat that is the secret to the great wood-fired taste. We recommend that you take 45-60 minutes to heat up your Chicago Brick Oven wood burning oven to its hottest cooking temperature of 800° F-1,000° F before you cook. Remember that you can cook a wide range of appetizers in your oven as it begins to get to the full temperature. In ambient temperatures below 40° F, we recommend you take a little longer to heat up your oven.

And if you have any concerns about how long it takes to heat our ovens, see what our founders say in the “For the Love of a Wood-Fired Oven” video on our YouTube channel.

 

Firing your oven.


Once you’ve properly cured your oven, you’re ready to fire it for cooking.

 

Always start with dry kindling placed 10 inches from the front of the oven. Never use chemicals or starter fluids.

 

Once the fire is going, add small pieces of wood to build the fire. You want to raise the temperature slowly, so avoid building a huge fire that pours out of the mouth of the oven.

 

We recommend adding large chunks of wood to the fire once it’s going strong. Add these chunks and start moving the fire to the back of the oven — about 20 minutes after the fire is going.

 

You’ll notice the oven dome turning black. As the temperatures rise and more heat is stored in the dome, it will turn a whitish grey. Your goal is to heat the oven in a way that the entire dome turns whitish grey.