Monday 8 October 2007

What/How to cook in an outdoor woodfired oven...

Using some old fence posts, get a good fire happening. Then throw on 10 or so sticks of red gum. Believe me, we've experimented with LOTS of variations of wood, but red gum burns the best.. long, hot and slow....You can get about 1/2 a tonne delivered for about $120, but a 1/2 tonne will last you about 10 firings.








What you want it a hot HOT fire that burns down to nice coals.




Once the coals are glowing, get a big stick and push all the coals to the sides of the oven. Wait a few mins for the dust and soot to settle...



Assemble all your ingredients.



Test out the temp of your oven by cooking something small... In this case, pasta dura spread with basil and pine nut tapenade and topped with baby boc's... and sprinkled with dukkah (after the cooking. the seeds in Dukkah don't stand up to the heat of the oven and burn rapidly and become all nasty and bitter.



This should cook off in less that a minute.

What we do, is lay out various ingredients on the bench and then let the kids and the guests run free.... This weekend, we had ham, salami, bocs, asparagus, eggs, chicken, Indian pickle, pasata, olives baby tomatoes, spinach and whatever other random things were lying around the fridge...

Here's one in the making... It's about 800c in there.. I burnt all the hairs off the back of my hand taking this shot!!!




You need to watch them carefully and move them around the oven, so that the centre ingredients melt and the crust doesn't sear.


And the final product!!!





Enjoy!!!

3 comments:

grocer said...

i now have to go and clean the drool off my monitor.
YUMMMMMMM!!!!''the piccies are much improved too - ya ya must also be a good teacher!

purple goddess said...

Hey, Grocer!!!

Thanks for the kudos. I've been doing a few on-line food photography tutes, and indeed young Ya Ya HAS given me a few hints!!

Thanks for dropping by!!

stickyfingers said...

Oh wow - I have oven envy. Love your blog and sense of humour. With those oven skills you'd be an asset at The Blogger's Banquet. It's being organised by Ed Charles over at Tomatom - he's tee'd up the wood oven & BBQ's over at Veg Out for a blogger feeding frenzy in November. Are you coming? Detail's at Ed's blog and mine (Under Spring Tom 2...and a few others by now...
... great blog BTW.