Wood-fired Cooking : Techniques And Recipes For...

Jillyanna (Jill Strauss) has worked in professional restaurant kitchens throughout New England and has studied Italian cooking with famous cookbook author Giuliano Hazan in Verona and fourth-generation pizzaiolo Enzo Coccia in Naples. In 2012, Jill renovated her own private kitchen and picturesque patio to create an elegant indoor and outdoor classroom where she can share her Italian-inspired recipes and woodfired cooking techniques with students from all over the world.

Wood-fired cooking : techniques and recipes for...

"Jillyanna is a master of her craft and has sought out amazing techniques and recipes to share with us. We had a blast making pasta and the end result was magnificent. I think we will be thinking about homemade pasta with Bolognese for a while now, and the best part is she made us feel like it's achievable to do on our own. The class is educational and also very delicious. It's well planned to maximize learning many recipes all while making sure you leave with a full and happy tummy."

During a cooking show in London, Hugh McGivern, Executive Chef in some of the best Michelin restaurants in London, also tried a J.Corradi wood-burning range cooker. Today he has a sweet recipe for us, chocolate and pistachio biscuits rigorously baked with the traditional wood-fired method.

yourFire provides more main cooking techniques that take advantage of fire. In today's article we will discover cooking on the spit, which makes your mouth water just by referring to it. Happy reading!

A great smoked appetizers for your charred peppers recipes; our ember bed cooking of peppers provides great flavor. How to roast peppers in a grill, cooking on coals directly, cooking in embers, gas grill, charcoal grill, even cast iron skillet cooking will work for peppers. Try this charred pepper dip topping.

For recipes with cook times longer than 30 minutes, you will need to add fresh coals midway through the cooking process to maintain a consistent temperature. So be sure you have a fresh batch ready when the time comes.

The book moves you from the recipe-following-digital-oven way of thinking and cooking to a relaxed, intuitive style of cooking. When cooking is relaxed and fun, the oven comes into its own as an entertainment center. The delicious recipes are included for showing how to get the best out of your wood-fired oven.

The author includes a concise and clear description of oven management, the dynamics of how fire works in the vault, and pictures of the heat zones/environments (that match with the recipes). The reader quickly gets the point that a wood-fired oven is not just for pizza. Ms. Mugnaini believes the wood-fired oven is the most sophisticated and versatile appliance in your kitchen. Your oven can harness the power of fire and reach temperatures no gas oven can match. (p.18)

And the pizza party to break in the oven was fabulous. He really "gets it" regarding both cooking with a wood-fired oven and entertaining outdoors. Can't say enough about getting someone who really knows all aspects of the process, and does quality work. We are extremely happy with the outcome. "

One of our most versatile oven designs is the Cru 32G2, which has been enhanced from the original design to improve thermo efficiency by adding a heat deflector to the top of the dome and increasing the stand's durability. With the Cru 32G2, you can do so much more than just make great pizza. You have the freedom to cook on the stone by pushing the fire back, cook on the coals by pushing the fire forward, or use a grill grid or any oven-safe cookware you prefer. Your cooking options are limitless, and you won't be limited by your oven's capabilities. The Cru 32 G2 is crafted by hand in Portugal using dual walled and insulated 1.5mm thick 304 stainless steel, ensuring a lifetime of wood-fired cooking.

I have never enjoyed cooking and this has been the breakthrough for me. Learning new techniques and doing it with others has been fun. It has also helped me to learn new ways to use my farm share. I am a real fan of this program and will be signing up for more.

For this reason, modern gas-fired pizza ovens come with a refractory floor as the cooking surface and they can expose food to an open flame and reach 1000 F like their wood-fired conterparts.

So I guess if I lived in your area or was very interested in survival cooking (which I do find a bit interesting to tell you the truth) I would still use scales because I want to take advantage of all the methods of making my bread the best it can be that have developed over the centuries and culminated in today's techniques, but I would make an effort to get as much of a feel as possible for how much of each ingredient I was using - whether that involved translating the weighed amount to 'handfuls', or just eyeballing it would depend on how much time I had I suppose. Then you could practice a loaf or two with only the memorized recipe and your new units of measurement. You could even write a cookbook with both weights and 'handfuls'!

About Vindulge: Vindulge is an award-winning wood fired food and wine blog based in Portland, Ore. Founded by Mary Cressler in 2009. With hundreds of recipes and videos, Vindulge seeks to educate and make the outdoor wood-fired cooking experience fun and easy. You can find Mary and her husband Sean chasing their twins around town, and occasionally a few wineries. You can follow along at www.vindulge.com.

Mark (00:14):G'day, welcome to the Wood Fired Oven podcast, where I take a deep dive into the techniques, recipes and history of wood-fired oven cooking. My name is Mark an obsessed and somewhat curious fan of outdoor cooking, especially with my wood-fired oven. Follow my podcast in your favourite app and listen in as I go searching for the best recipes, tips, and advice to both supercharge our cooking skills and motivate you to light up your favourite outdoor cooking gear this weekend.Mark (00:49):G'day and welcome to this week's episode. Thank you so much for tuning into the Wood Fired Oven podcast. I had such a blast on the last episode, discussing all things pizza with Adrian. He's a super-duper home cook expert, and I learned a heap from Adrian. So thanks Adrian. I know the feedback that we've both received has been overwhelmingly positive, and I really appreciate that feedback. It seems that the listeners really want more interviews with home cooks and with the folk in the wood-fired oven industry. And I'm really pleased to let you know that over the next three or four months, I've got some fantastic, super exciting guests, all booked in, ready to go on the Wood Fired Oven podcast. And I'm very, very grateful to them. I'm not going to tell you today who those guests are, we'll just leave you in suspense for a little bit longer, but I can assure you, you'll be familiar with them. Really, really exciting to roll these out. And, for me personally, to get to know some of these fantastic folks who are involved in wood-fired oven cooking around the world. So stay tuned for more on that.Mark (01:55):So today I'm going to be cooking a T-bone steak in the wood-fired oven, and at the end of the cook, I'm going to be kissing it with some hay smoke, which is a new favourite thing I really like to do, both with soft vegetables and with meat. Hay produces a gorgeous earthly flavour to whatever you're cooking. And I think it lends itself so well to the wood-fired oven, which is not really set up as a smoker. The design of the oven doesn't really allow the smoke to get in and permeate the food. Now I love using my smokers. I've got three smokers beside me here in the yard, and I just love to use them.Mark (02:33):I've been using my smokers a lot longer than I've been using my wood-fired oven, but what I'm really enjoying doing at the moment is merging these two cooking styles together. It's a, the smoker wood fire oven fusion process for me. In a couple of weeks, I'm going to be exploring smoking chickens, smoking pork, and bringing those smoked flavours into the wood-fired oven in a dish that we've been doing as a family for a very long time. So stay tuned. That's going to be a three-part series on using smokers and using fusion in the wood-fired oven.Mark (03:08):So I've cooked T-bone steak quite a few times now in the wood-fired oven, I've experimented with different thicknesses, with different cooking styles. The actual cooking process is not terribly difficult, but it is such a gorgeous piece of meat for us down here in Australia and New Zealand, it really is the quintessential barbecue steak, their tender, their rich, their super flavoursome, the T-bone or the porterhouse as it might be called in your part of the world, has a tenderloin on one side of the bone and a sirloin on the other. And they do, taste a little different. They are the premier cuts on the beef, I think, they are just gorgeous. I know in Tuscany, the Italian folks really like, really really thick T-bones, which is just fantastic.Mark (03:56):So I headed out to the butcher a couple of days ago, and I wanted to pick up two T-bones, and I asked for about a six centimeter cut. And what I ended up with was closer to an eight centimeter cut, which is pretty thick. It's around about three inches thick, and I am a little concerned about how it's going to work out, but I suspect the only difference here will be a longer cooking time. Not really going to change my process too much today. Each of these T-bones worked out to be about 1.1, 1.2 kilos each, so it is a very large cut of a T-bone. Going to be a lot of fun to cook thoughMark (04:36):So I've also prepared a large pan of roast vegetables, nothing particularly fancy here, nothing I haven't already done on the podcast. I've got pumpkin, I've got some potatoes, I've got some carrots and I've got some red onions, thrown into this pan, drizzled with olive oil, and sprinkled with salt. And I'm just pouring in a bit of a vermouth to the bottom of the pan. I really like adding that to alcohol [laughter], to the roast vegetables. It's lovely! Really, really nice. Mixing all that through. And I'm gonna to put that in the oven, well I guess it's going to be until it's done. So it's going to be around about an hour maybe, maybe an hour and 20 minutes towards the end of the cooking cycle. That's when I'm going to get the T-bones underway. When I do my roast vegetables, I always like to put them in uncovered, first, for about 10 to 15 minutes, just to get kissed by that fire. And then I wrap it in foil. So just wrapping it in foil now and sliding it back into the wood-fired oven, the smells are ready. The olive oil is starting to smell, the pepper. Oh its smelling so good! Okay, its all wrapped up, heading back into the wood-fired oven. So when cooking my steak in the wood-fired oven and vegetables, I still had to get my oven up nice and hot. I still like to clear the dome. And so that's going to mean that the oven temperature is pretty warm. Then I just utilise the different areas of the floor to ensure that things aren't over cooked. So the vegetables are towards the side of the oven. I know, covered with foil, it's commercial grade kitchen foil, their well-protected. And they will just sit in the side there, and sizzle away and roast gently in the oven for that hour. Means that when it comes time to cook the steak on the Tuscan grill, I can put it deep into the oven and get a tremendous amount of heat quickly to the steak.Mark (06:24):So we've got a little bit of time before I start the steak. Let's have a question from one of the listeners. Now, recently I've started using SpeakPipe and SpeakPipe, it's a great product, allows you to record a little audio snippet and send it into me on the Wood Fired Oven podcast. That way I can get your question on air and reply. So if you want to give that a go, head onto my website, woodfiredoven.cooking. If you're on Instagram, check out my link in my bio, and you can record a quick question, a 30 second question, and you might get featured on the show.Sarah (06:59):Hi Mark! My names Sarah. Absolutely love your podcast. Your last episode with Adrian was fantastic. Hope you get to do more interviews. My question is I've noticed a few hair line cracks in my bricks within my oven. I was just wondering, is that normal? Do you think I should repair it or leave it? Thanks so much!Mark (07:17):Great question, Sarah, and look, thanks for trying out SpeakPipe and getting in touch with me. Go Sarah! Alright. Cracks in the brick work in the wood-fired oven. Actually, I've had another question recently on this very same issue, and I wouldn't worry about the cracks. As long as the cracks are hairline, like you say, and perhaps, aren't any wider in development, then maybe three to four mil, maybe two to three mil. I've actually got a number of cracks in the back of my wood-fired oven. They tend to follow the mortar line, and on a couple of places they actually crossed the brick and the bricks cracked. It's all gonna depend on your style of oven as well. With my oven, it's a, it's a heavy, heavy, thick brick oven. The dome is probably at least 30 centimetres or so thick. So hairline cracks in the brick work, they're not gonna to change the integrity of the oven. They're not gonna change the cooking styles in the oven. And for me, I think if you're going to start repairing that sort of stuff, you're going to introduce moisture back into the dome. It's going to take a while for that to dry out. You're going to have to be very careful, lighting up fires again in your wood fired oven. I would suggest you leave it. If they are minor. If they're larger than that, however, I think you should probably start considering making a repair. Talk to the manufacturer of the oven. When I finished building my oven after the first two or three curing fires, I then did a, a much higher temperature light up. And after a couple of those lineups, I did notice these cracks start to develop. And initially I was a bit disappointed. I thought all of that work that I'd put into it, and now this thing's cracking, but I soon realised that that's part and parcel of cooking in a wood-fired oven with the bricks. It's become its own character. And it's part of the oven. And you notice that these cracks can expand and contract slightly depending on the temperature of your oven. So I am no longer disappointed with those cracks. I actually think they look cool and I keep an eye on them. My eye goes to them and after a few years of using the oven, it's normal. I know it's normal. So don't worry about it. Thanks so much, Sarah, for getting in touch. If you'd like to ask a question, remember I head over to woodfiredoven.cooking. Or my link in my bio on Instagram and send me a quick audio question, would love to hear from you. I'm also open to suggestions via SpeakPipe as well. So get in touch and let me know what you think of this Wood Fired Oven podcast.Mark (09:40):So the vegetables have been in for just on an hour, and they're covered in foil and they are smelling fantastic. I'm now gonna get ready to do the steak. So, so I'm bringing the embers, charcoals from the fire into the centre of the oven. So when I do steak in the wood-fired oven, I'm using that gorgeous heat off the dome off the fire, which I've still got off to the side. And also from the brickwork at the bottom, I'm using every part of heat from this oven that I can. So I've got a stainless steel Tuscan grill, which is absolutely fantastic, really. And I'm just positioning that in the middle of the wood-fired oven, and just getting the charcoals and all the ambers surrounding the grill.Mark (10:28):So what I'd like to do before I do the steaks is super soak, this Tuscan grill. So it's now inside in the middle of the wood-fired oven sitting on top of embers. So when the steak hits that grill, it's sitting about six or seven millimetres above the hot embers. It's not going to take too long to cook I don't think. So there's not a lot I do to prepare the steak apart from ensuring it's nice and clean and cut well. Salt and pepper are the classics for a steak like this, really doesn't need too much. The beefy gorgeous flavors will come through. What I do do though, is I use a mixture of gorgeous, flaky salt, but also recently I've started to use hay salt. So to make hay salt, I get a cast iron pot, and I put a couple of big handfuls of hay in the pot and I light it up and I pop it into the wood-fired oven for a few minutes and it will flame and flare up and produce a lot of gorgeous smelling smoke. But what you're trying to do, is you're trying to burn the smoke down to ash basically. And once it's all turned into ash at the bottom of the pan, you take it out, you put it into a mortar and pestle and you grind it, and you grind it, and you grind it, until it becomes a powder. And then, you get some high quality flaky salt, and you pop that in to the mortar as well. You get your pestle and you grind and grind and grind until you've got a really fine hay smoked salt, taste it. Oh! It's so good. It really, really is great. Sprinkle that on top of the T-bone and you're gonna impart some real rich smoky flavours to the steak. And it's beautiful! Coupled with the smoking of the hay, right at the end, it is something quite different. I really, really challenge you to try it. It's absolutely beautiful. Hay smoked T-bone steak.Mark (12:23):Okay. Now I've had my T-bone steak out on the bench in the kitchen cupboard for about 19 minutes. It's really important that you let your steak come up to room temperature before you throw it on the hot grill. So at least 60 minutes for a steak like this. Now my steaks is pretty thick. So I've left it for a little bit longer, about an hour and a half, just to ensure that the whole steak is ready to hit that super heat and in the wood fired oven. Okay, it's time to put the steak now into the wood-fired oven, putting it on the Tuscan grill now, and it's gonna probably take maybe eight to 10 minutes aside. It is really thick and it's the thickest T-bone I've cooked, so not entirely sure how long it's going to take to cook, but we'll give it a go for about eight minutes and we'll test it about that time.Mark (13:11):Now I always temperature check my steak and my chicken. I've got a couple of thermapens that I do my temperature checking with, and I highly recommend temperature checking. Now, I like to get my steaks to about medium rare, which is round about a hundred and thirty, a hundred and thirty five degrees Fahrenheit or between 54 and 57, 58 degrees Celsius. I actually temperature check my food in Fahrenheit for some weird reason. I think it's because, and I say, it's weird because I'm a Kiwi living in Australia and we're in Celsius down here, but I must have watched far too many Barbecue Pit Masters when I was learning how to use my smokers, [laughter] that I've now become accustomed to working my food, temperatures in Fahrenheit, which is, which is just fine. Okay. So that's what we're targeting, don't know quite how long that's gonna take, but let's see.Mark (14:02):Okay. I'm just checking the steaks, now I'm going to flip them over. It's been around about eight minutes, maybe eight or nine minutes. Ah man it smells so good. So the side that's been next to the embers, that's caramelised just beautifully and the smell coming off that is just divine. All right. Flipping it over, putting it back in the oven for about another eight or nine minutes or so. And we'll see what it's like, at that point. Okay. So I'm just going to temperature check the steaks now, I like to, it's a big piece. I'm going to te