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!!!