Cooking Entirely Without Gas

Man and his oven

In April and early May warm weather comes as a welcome surprise and home cooks rush outside for the season’s first session with their long-neglected Webers.  By the end of November most are driven inside to the comfort of oven-heated kitchens but for those willing to brave the chill, outdoor cooking at this time of year holds a particular reward.

For nearly two years I have been interested in the idea of building a brick, wood-fired oven.  My cousin, Alex, through some enviable luck has managed to acquire a pre-fabricated one and through a good deal of heavy-lifting has set it up in his backyard.For the un-initiated I offer some quick background.  Brick ovens like his have four phases to it:

1. The oven floor which holds the fire, collects heat and later releases it to the food that is being cooked;
2. A dome that covers the floor, controls the movement of air within the oven (by its shape), absorbs and reflects heat, and has a door built into it for oven access;
3. A structural base that raises the oven floor to approximately waist height; and
4. A layer of insulation that helps the dome retain heat, some sort of cladding that keeps the insulation in place and makes things look nice, and (optionally) a chimney to improve airflow and move the smoke up and out the top of the oven instead of back into the cook’s face.

To move this beast (eight guys and an improvised 2X4 sedan chair tried) the insulation and cladding had to be cut away from the dome so for now Alex’s oven looks oddly naked.

Dome shaped ovens are designed for cooking pizza while the barrel-vault is more suited to bread but so long as it will fit into the oven door just about anything can be cooked in either.  I call them “brick ovens” but they don’t necessarily use bricks.  Alex’s is made from sort of cast (possibly fire mortar-like) concrete.  Traditional ovens in Quebec were made by packing clay onto straw and twigs built in a elliptical dome shape.

Double "wood-fired" frozen pizza

On my most recent trip to their place we started our day of cooking with a frozen pizza.  Frozen pizza?  Isn’t that sacrilege?  If it was a bad pizza or that was all we cooked in the oven I guess it would be but not this one.  President’s Choice sells about 251 takes on frozen pizza and I have never had this particular version–ironically it’s their “Wood-fired” one–heated in a kitchen so it’s tough to judge the difference our cooking technique but it was great.  Also, this process is much more advanced than just throwing the frozen disc into the oven and setting a timer.  To achieve even doneness and to make sure the centre was defrosted and cooked before the edges burned we were continuously turning the tray (used to keep the bottom relatively ash-free) and adjusting how close it was to the fire at the back of the oven.  Great taste and the sense of accomplishment that comes from homemade pie just without the twenty-four hours of forethought or the blinding frustration of stretching dough.

The temperature inside this oven is really impressive.  Without an infrared thermometer it’s tough to accurately quantify it but that doesn’t stop every guy who comes within ten feet of the oven from trying.  There seems to be some sort of genetic predisposition that compels us to try holding our hand in the oven’s mouth or tapping our palm against the outside oven wall.

Fire-roasted salmon

On my first occasion watching this oven in action we added a couple glugs of white wine to an enameled cast iron roasting pan with a big piece of salmon in it.  Without a spark or any other prompting the alcohol fumes released by the wine ignited.  Obviously brandy and higher-proofed spirits like rum will flambe but this usually requires the aid of a match or a carefully calibrated tilting of the pan over a gas flame but I was amazed to see white wine spontaneously accomplish the feat.

Pork belly and lentils roasting away

This time as a first course for dinner I made a similar version of the pork belly and lentils from an earlier post.  The pork belly came out nicely (a tough one to screw up in my opinion) but the lentils weren’t quite right.  I could only find Eston lentils instead of the vastly preferred Puy lentils.  This wikipedia page has both types in a list of lentils but doesn’t discuss the difference–does anyone know what the culinary difference is?  The lentils were chewier than I would have liked and they picked up an acrid flavour from the smoke so I probably would have been better off using a covered dutch oven.

We also used the oven to melt a round of brie and to warm the baguettes that went with it.  The key here (and also in a conventional oven) is to warm the brie in a pan that isn’t much larger than the cheese and not worry if it melts.  Should your cheese balloons to a shape and size somewhere between a softball and a rugby bowl it’s a good idea to remove it from the heat and carefully pierce the rind with a knife.

The main event

As a main course Alex cooked pork roasts and a bacon-covered chicken.   Just like the pizza these required some manipulation to ensure even cooking and consistent browning.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay to taste the, I’m sure delicious, results.

Feeding the fire

Brick ovens are simple tools that require a surprisingly variable level of attention: The fire is lit in the mouth and encouraged to burn to the back of the oven and left to its own devices to heat over a couple hours, but the cook’s job once the food goes in is much closer to what happens on a kitchen stove as we turn, flip, and adjust position rather than a knob.  We know it is time to cook based on visual evidence–the inside of the oven dome goes white–and by judging how long our hand can bear the heat.  I really like the hands-on nature of this type of cooking and I’m sure this won’t be my last post on the topic.