Genevieve Taylor - The Ultimate Wood-Fired Oven Cookbook

Cooking with wood is wonderfully addictive, and I hope this book will inspire you to get outside and make the most of your wood-fired oven.

Owning a wood-fired oven has become so desirable in recent years, but why bother when you have a perfectly good oven in your kitchen? For me, its about throwing off the shackles of technology, embracing a bit of culinary adventure and getting back to basics with that most primal of elements, fire. The sense of achievement you feel from striking a single match and mastering a fire in which you can cook a multitude of dishes is, quite simply, huge.

If there is one thing I want to shout from the rooftops, it is that the oven you bought to make perfect wood-fired pizza will also make a million and one other things just as brilliantly. The breadth of dishes you can get out of a wood-fired oven is almost limitless you can roast, grill, barbecue and smoke in it, as well as use it as a hob and a giant slow cooker. Within these pages you will find not only a multitude of pizza ideas but delicious breads, cakes and puddings, alongside inspiration for kebabs, quick roasts and slow braises from all over the world. There is even a marmalade mousse, a wood-fired cream tea, an overnight fruit cake for Christmas and a pot of steaming porridge for breakfast. Your wood-fired oven is a tremendously versatile cooking tool, ripe and ready for exploration.

Without temperature dials and fan controls you become a more intuitive cook, one who values their senses of smell, sight, taste and even touch over the beep of the oven timer. You will need to free yourself from the idea of set recipe times and cooking temperatures as a professional recipe writer this has been both challenging and liberating. So, while the recipes within these pages do come with times and temperatures, I would urge you not to be bound by them; more important is cultivating an attitude of its done when its done, and a willingness to work in tandem with your fire. Like mastering anything new, practice and repetition build confidence, and with confidence comes success. You will have times when the oven doesnt perform as you want it to I still get the odd day like that if its particularly damp or cold but persist and you will reap the rewards.

Cooking in a wood-fired oven is hugely sociable, so dont be surprised if friends and neighbours gather round your fire and want to get involved. Its also worth saying that I really hope you use your oven year round, not just on balmy summer evenings. These ovens are a real investment, both in time and money, whichever sort you have, so its great to make the most of them.

The most satisfying part of wood-fired cookery is learning how to maximize the gently falling curve of temperature to cook multiple dishes. The recipes in this book reduce in temperature the further you delve through, the idea being that you start with the hottest things and move through to the coolest. Once you have generated a good fire with expensive kiln-dried wood, it absolutely pays to have several dishes prepped that you can add in, one after the other, as your oven cools down. This means that you can get several meals ready for future eating; stews and soups are great for this, as well as breads and cakes. There is tremendous satisfaction from knowing you are squeezing every drop of energy out of your fire.

I can be found on social media as @genevieveeats, so do wave hello, hit me with your wood-fired questions and share pictures of your ovens and edible creations!

WHAT SORT OF OVEN TO CHOOSE?

There are loads of different wood-fired ovens out there, from fixed ovens like mine made of brick and stone, to rather dinky table-top and portable ovens, and if you are yet to buy your oven there are lots of things to think about to help you choose which is right for you. Here are some points to consider:

How much room do you have? Can the oven be fixed in place, or do you need to move it around your garden or store it inside for the winter if its not weatherproof?

Portable ovens, like the Uuni or Roccbox, are brilliant for a sleek, compact design and a relatively affordable price tag. And if you move house you can take it with you.

Metal ovens heat up faster and therefore you can cook on them sooner, but they also tend to cool down more quickly, which can limit the range of food you can cook.

Built-in brick or stone ovens have more potential for insulation. If you want to cook using retained heat for several hours, or even overnight, you will need an oven thats well insulated on the top, bottom and sides. Wanting to maximize the full range of cooking options available, this is the oven I chose, but its a serious investment in terms of both money and garden space.

Big isnt necessarily best bigger ovens do take longer to heat up and if pizza is your primary aim, bear in mind they only take a couple of minutes to cook so you dont necessarily need to fit several in at once (and its often easier to cook singly anyway; see the chapter, for pizza-making tips). But bigger ovens also take longer to cool, so can be excellent if you are keen on low and slow cooking. I found a middle-sized oven offered the best of both worlds for what I wanted.

MY OVEN

All the recipes in this book were tested in a wood-fired oven in my back garden in Bristol. I cook in a medium-sized, well-insulated dome oven which I bought as a kit from Gozney Ovens, a Dorset-based company which designs and manufactures them locally. The oven itself is DEFRA approved for use in smoke-controlled areas, important as I live in a smoke-controlled city and wanted to make sure my oven was as energy-efficient as possible. I burn only very low moisture content, kiln-dried timber and compressed sawdust bricks, not only for their superior cooking heat but also because of the lower smoke and particulate emissions that come from a more efficient burn. The oven is supremely well insulated top and bottom, and with one really good fire I can be cooking in it for 24 hours, or even a little more, as the heat falls gently away over time.

My husband and I installed it ourselves, a physically hard but rewarding job that took several weekends of very hard graft. We started by building a solid base with good foundations that acts as a log and tool store underneath the oven, on which sit layers of insulating board atop a grid of strong concrete lintels. The dome itself was positioned on top, offset from the centre to give me a wide shelf for food preparation, and then insulated with thick thermal wool before adding a 10cm (4in) thick coat of vermiculite-concrete mix skimmed over with a flexible render. All in all its a very sturdy beast indeed and its going nowhere. We filmed the build process in time-lapse, and you can find the film on my YouTube channel should you wish to see it in more detail (search for GenevieveEatsTV).

WHERE TO PUT YOUR OVEN?