I remember when we cooked on a wood fire. We didn’t have a natural gas or electric stove. Mom cooked with fire.
Today, that’s so bizarre that when we cook with fire, it’s an entertainment event.
We’ve worked on perfecting cooking with fire, using our wood-fired oven to cook pizza. Velda makes the dough 2 days in advance, begins staging the pizza ingredients 1 day in advance … and then I light the fire 4 hours out.
Cold oven, ready to go.
Three pages of newsprint, loosely crumpled.
Small cut-offs crossed on top of the newsprint. It’s a handy way to clean up scraps from the woodshop … these scraps are from 3 different projects.
One match! Well, it’s like a match….
Lots of smoke can be generated by wet wood, or a wet chimney.
Keep air space between the wood pieces.
Until the chimney is hot and sucks all of the smoke up, some will come out the front of the oven.
The temperature climb is inevitable … and always slower than I would like.
Too much fuel can temporarily choke the fire …
… and generate too much smoke until the fuel is fully engulfed in flame again.
And the temperature continues to rise.
We burn a lot of oak … both lumber cut-offs and firewood.
The red hot coals continue to heat the oven … you can see the black soot begin to cook off of the side of the oven, leaving the white, hot brick.
An 800* oven will cook a pizza in under 5 minutes.
Move the coals to either side of the oven.
I use an old broom handle to move coals in the oven.
The broom handle slowly burns away as I use it.
A brass brush is used to clear the oven floor.
A damp mop cleans the floor of ash before you begin cooking.
The mopping temporarily lowers the floor temperature a bit … but the big concrete & rock oven serves as a heat sink so the temperature does not fall in the oven.
We always start with a “sacrificial cheese pizza” … but that’s a story for another day.
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