Is there aroma transfer in wood fired ovens?

Question

I love making pizza. And I've been reading this book "The Neapolitan Pizza", which is supposed to be, as they describe it in the subtitle, "a scientific guide about the artisanal process". I was fascinated by the amount of technical information available in there.

Though, I was in shock when I read the following, the authors were talking about wood fired ovens: "The concept of wood giving a particular aroma is false: there's no transfer of aromas from the wood to the pizza".

I remember getting some bread from a place called (now ironically) "Firehouse", great bakery. And I remember feeling this fantastic taste of a smoked delicacy in their loafs. Have I been fooled by my brain? I'd really expect that at least tiny particles of burnt wood and other chemicals from the smoke to somehow land on the baked good and give that a taste, why that doesn't happen? Or is the smoked flavour something different from the wood flavour?

Answer 1

The book is correct, for two reasons:

1. Wood-fired pizza ovens are not smokey, instead having very good draft in order to allow maximum hot fire burning.
2. A pizza is in a Neapolitan pizza oven for 60-100 seconds, which is not enough time for something to absorb smoke flavors, even if the oven were smokey.

The reason to use a wood-burning oven for your pizza is the intense heat of 450C or more, which is required for many Italian pizza types. That heat is harder to achieve in electric or gas ovens. If you get any flavor of wood at all, it would be only from any ash stuck to the oven floor.

However, where you noticed the smoke flavor was from bread, which cooks for up to an hour, in a much lower heat. Given that amount of time, a bit of smoke getting into the crust is a lot more possible.

Answer 2

The smokey flavor comes from fat dripping onto the wood.

They Youtuber MatPat runs a channel named Food Theory, and in one of his videos, he discusses an experiment he performed that involved grilling burgers and hotdogs on both a charcoal and propane grill for taste-testers to take blind samples of, and while the taste-testers were able to correctly identify the type of grill used for both hot dogs and meat burger patties, they were reduced to change for guessing whether or not a vegetarian burger patty was grilled on the propane or charcoal grill. He elaborates that based on his research, it seems that the reason for this may have been because the smoky flavor that charcoal grills create is actually caused by the meat dripping onto the wood, and the particles of the burnt drippings becoming aersolized and returning to the meat.

As a result, you'd expect that other non-meat dishes like bread would also lack the smoky flavor; while a pizza might contain meat and cheese, it's unlikely that much of the fat from them would be able to drip onto the fire and burn away like it would for a bare piece of meat cooked directly on the grill. You might be able to get a degree of smoky flavor if you apply melted butter or vegetable oil to the bottom of the pizza's base, however.