Pyrolitic ovens and home made pizzas

[Participant]

Edit - found some links that say the oven will lock itself, so his thread is probably redundant unless anyone knows how to disable the lock!

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Has anyone tried using their oven's self-cleaning function to cook stuff? Was it successful?

I'm looking to get into home made pizzas. Tools at my disposal are a BBQ with good quality charcoal, and a decent Siemens oven, which reaches ~300 degrees C in normal modes, but also has a pyrolitic function.

I've got a pizza stone and a few other bits on the way.

Something struck me when researching dough recipes etc. last night...is there any reason why I can't use the pyrolitic function to replicate the temperatures achieved in a proper wood-fired pizza oven?

I've Googled it but not found much, so I'm assuming this is a bad idea for a reason I've not thought of. Perhaps the oven prevents itself being opened when in pyrolitic mode, for example...

Anyway, has anyone tried this?

 

[Participant]

OMG this is bad for a million reasons. Let me describe to you how my Neff pyrolitic oven works. You turn to the cleaning program, the oven starts heating up. After about five minutes, the oven locks itself. It then spends the next just over an hour gradually heating itself up to about 450 degrees centigrade. It cycles each heating element around the oven (including the upper/lower grill and fan elements to red hot), getting the oven hotter and hotter over a period of time so nothing is given too much thermal shock too quickly. Any food in there isn't just carbonised, it's turned to fine ash. You're recommended to clean the glass first, so that any big particles of food don't create a hot spot of carbon on the glass while this happens. When the cleaning cycle is finished, the oven stays locked for the approximate hour it takes to cool down.

So, you don't have any control short of aborting the cycle (oven still won't unlock until it cools), you have no control over the temperature or where the heat comes from, you have no control over the ramp up of heat flying around the oven. It takes 45mins to an hour to get to 450 degrees. It's designed to turn any particles of food into ash. Anything significantly large could turn into a fire before it's carbonised into coal and then ash. You could set fire to your oven/kitchen/house.

Just buy a pizza stone and read the manual to see how you are supposed to use it in the oven.

So if I could disable the door lock, it would work as an idea?

I've got a pizza stone. Delivered today. I'm assuming they're not quite as good as an 'authentic' high heat method though?

 

[Participant]

Ok I've written this idea off now. Realistically I'm not going to start playing with the internals of my expensive oven anyway.

Plan b - pizza stone in oven / BBQ then buy / build a pizza oven when I have a bigger garden.

My oven has a 'pizza setting'; oooo!