I was just gifted the book and have only flipped through it so far. On page 132, there is a description of rotating the pizza in a wood fired oven. Part of it is moving the pizza to a different part of the oven floor. So in 3 partial rotations, the pizza starts at the back of the oven and eventually ends up close to the door. Never heard that advice before. I've only heard the opposite- keep it in the same spot.
Dans suggestion on how to bake is actually a pretty common technique for a busy pizzeria. I have seen the clockwork thing at a lot of pizzerias in Naples and a few in the US as well. I know that at one time this is the method that was being taught by Enzo Coccia. There are a number of different methods that work for wood burning ovens depending on how conductive your floor is, how high of a dome you have, how active the oven has been, and what the balance of your top to bottom heat is.
The suggestion to keep the pizza in one place is important during slow times in a pizzeria, or if your a home cook where your not making many pizzas at a time and back to back. If you have a floor thats really hot during slow times it can be especially helpful, and with wood burning ovens they do tend to get really hot floors in between lunch and dinner service when the orders slow down. Razza is only open for dinner, and so busy that there are always lots of pizzas in the oven sucking heat out of the floor, so this method works great there.
Wood burning ovens are much hotter at the back than the front. If your busy and are going to have a lot of pizzas in the oven at the same time you want to rotate them to different positions in the oven, otherwise your pizzas in the front will bake a lot slower than the ones in the rear of the oven. To make consistent pizzas you need to utilize both the hot part at the back, and the cooler part at the front. Again, at home or at slower pizzerias this isn't really an issue as long as you know the perfect place to drop the pizza for whatever temp it happens to be idling at, and how that works with your particular dough formulation.
Sometimes your oven floor is not as hot as your top heat... for instance if you havent put wood in the oven for a while and then put on a log that burns quickly. In this situation where you have too much top heat its better to move the pizza to a fresh spot on the floor and not just rotate it in place.
