Monday, November 26, 2007

Wood-Fired Cooking

In my previous post, I shared my Food Fantasy about purchasing a wood-fired oven. I got the idea for this by attending a couple of months ago a "Wood-Fired Cooking" class through Healdsburg's Relish Cooking School.
The class was awesome. It was hosted by Andrea Mugnaini, whose Mugnaini company has helped re-introduce to the U.S. authentic Italian wood-fired ovens. Andrea cooked all kinds of goodies (see pics below) as well as went over the highlights of wood-fired cooking. Here are some of the tid-bits I took away from her class:
* Wood-fired ovens don't use gas or electricity, and have no moving parts
* You don't use a thermometer to cook: you look at the various colors of the charcoal and use your hand
* When the oven is fully heated, food cooks FAST (pizzas take about 3 minutes)
* While the floors are the thickest part of the oven (cause that's where the fire is), once the oven has heated, the TOP of the oven is actually hotter than the floor

Andrea prepping:

Pizza!


Simple:


Even desserts!

O.K., and if you really want to dream, how about this: every year Andrea leads a week-long "Art of Wood-Fired Cooking" class in...Tuscany. Now THAT would be cool.

2 comments:

Azy Does It said...

Is the second picture down prosciutto? Looks delicioso!

Anonymous said...

That really would be cool, T. Gorgeous photos of the food. Did I see figs? *shiver* I love figs.