cooking at 300-400

[darren71]

I am new to this forum. I have started building my oven. so I have been thinking of all kinds of questions. I have spent hours surfing the net for different recipes and how to cook in the oven. The one thing I haven't found an answer to is starting a fire to cook at 350 or just lower temperatures. A lot of the recipes I have found are calling for cooking in the oven at lower temps than you would use for cooking pizza. So my question is. Do you heat the oven all the way up to turn the dome white ( 800 - 900 deg) and let it cool down before cooking or do you just heat the oven to the temp you want to cook at ( 300-400 deg)? Any advice would be great.

Thank you,
Darren

[Tscarborough]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Yes, you heat it to full saturation, then ride the heat curve down. This may mean that you cook pizza on day one, bread day 2, and meat/vegetables on day three, if you want. You could also leave the door open and cool it down faster.

[Tonyp]

Re: cooking at 300-400

I don't have a whole lot of experience yet but have cooked with both the residual heat for several days after a pizza night, as well as just lighting a small fire for a little while and roasting some game hens while the fire was dying down. So you can cook use the oven in other ways. Couple days ago we lit a fire to build up a small bed of coals to grill some burgers over.

Maybe with practice you could learn how long and large a fire would be needed to reach say 400 after removing the coals and allowing the oven time to reach equilibrium? I think the challenge would be figuring out how hot the inner brick face needs to be and for how long so that when it equalizes you are at your target temperature.

[GianniFocaccia]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Hi Darren,

It's easy to regulate oven temps for active fire cooking, and the results can be spectacular. As long as your oven is large enough (mine is a 39" pompeii) you will be able to create very predictable, consistent heat zones within your oven. Make a moderate fire on the side and simply add slightly smaller wood chunks as needed to keep it steady. You will find you can maintain temps anywhere from 350F to 500F as long as you want. I'm sure every oven behaves differently but in my oven there is a sweet spot 2/3 the way across the floor. Of course, a little closer to the fire gives that char much like a BBQ if needed.

I now prefer to cook with an active fire and the quality of heat makes for a very satisfying end product. I believe it is because the dome acts as a giant infrared radiator, and cooks the food differently than the hot air of a gas oven that cycles on and off. I don't have any real food pics, but here's a pic of what the fire looks like - these are chicken pot pies that were finished at 425F.

I recently saw a food channel episode that featured high-end restaurants that prepare wood-fired oven and grill dishes exclusively. According to the newspaper, there is currently an explosion of such restaurants here in Orange County. Here are two articles on this style of cooking:

Experience The Fire with Acclaimed Chef Noah Blom of ARC Food & Libations - Locale Magazine

Recipe: Mediterranean Braised Chicken with Meyer Lemon and Fennel - San Jose Mercury News

John

[SCChris]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Nice John!

C

[SableSprings]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Darren, as Tom, Tony, and John have already noted above - every oven has a unique character for cooking and baking. Throw in how you will most enjoy cooking/baking and suddenly it becomes a delightful journey into producing great food from a WFO that represents you and your personal style.

I always start a fire in the oven the night before a bake to begin the heat saturation of the bricks. With a few coals left in the morning, I get a small fire going and let it die down, add more wood and get it going again and repeat until the dome is clear. (Someone on the forum called this pulsing the oven to fully heat load it.) I normally have a 300-400F brick temp in the morning and will have the dome cleared at 650-700F with 3-4 smaller fires. Heat loading is done by 11-12 and I'm baking at around 575F by 2:30 to 3 pm. I like to clear the dome simply because I don't want any "dome soot" to fall on my food and it gives me a consistent starting point from which I can monitor the oven temp curve. As John said, once you've equalized and reached the oven temp you like, keeping it is fairly straight forward with a small side/back fire. It's also a great way to add some smoky goodness to your foods if you have some apple, mesquite, etc. chunks to keep those smaller fires going. Again as John said, that dome reflection of heat from a sustaining fire makes for an awesome cooking environment.

Part of the fun of the WFO is learning to use the whole heat curve that Tom refers to...pizza first, then breads, then roasts & poultry, then fish, then cookies, then beans...then diet...then repeat...

[david s]

Re: cooking at 300-400

We often cook a roast or bake bread in a partially heated oven. Usually fire for exactly one hour of flame. That brings my oven to around 250 C. At this point the crown of the oven is just starting to clear. It is not saturated with heat and the temp drops off faster because the heat is still making its way to the outer part of the dense refractory. But it is plenty to to cook the roast or bread, saves lots of fuel and time too.

[Laurentius]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Hi Darren,

No its not necessary nor advisable to fully saturate your oven every time you cook. Its a waste of fuel and time unless you`re cooking a multiple course meal, even then with a well insulated oven the temperature drop is very slow and if you try to regulate it by opening the door, once you close it the oven will stabilize to a higher temperature. If I fully saturate my oven, I could have cooked a full meal before it has cooled down enough for me to use.

As Mike suggested starting a fire the night before is a good idea, I usually get my fire roaring for about 30 minutes not allowing the wood burn up, throw in a couple of logs, seal it up. The next morning open it check the temperature, if its not hot enough the embers will ignite with no effort just a little air and maybe a log or two.Then you`re ready to get busy.

[Tscarborough]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Just to be clear, there are 2 methods of cooking in the oven: Live fire and no fire.
Live fire doesn't really work for baking bread and some things that cook for hours; for those you want a saturated oven (but that does not mean it has to be 900 degrees, it can be saturated at 400 degrees too, but you have to do that on the cool down end, not the heat up end).

For grilling or cooking things that do not take long, a short live fire is all that is needed, since the heat you are using is primarily from the fire, not the brick.

[Laurentius]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Just to be clear, there are 2 methods of cooking in the oven: Live fire and no fire.
Live fire doesn't really work for baking bread and some things that cook for hours; for those you want a saturated oven (but that does not mean it has to be 900 degrees, it can be saturated at 400 degrees too, but you have to do that on the cool down end, not the heat up end).

For grilling or cooking things that do not take long, a short live fire is all that is needed, since the heat you are using is primarily from the fire, not the brick.

Hi T,

I was hope that you didn`t really mean, what you said with your initial advice, sometime you don`t have time to "ride the wave". When the stomach`s growling and kids are crying, you just have to cook something fast.

[Tscarborough]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Absolutely, but if you want to hold 3-400 degrees for an hour or more and not tend the fire, you have to ride the wave down.

[darren71]

Re: cooking at 300-400

This is fantastic. I just sat down for the night and went to the forno forum and found a huge amount of great advice. Thanks for all the tips. Can't wait to get the oven finished so I can start experimenting.
Just finished putting a coat of stucco on the oven tonight.

Thanks for the great tips.

Darren

[Laurentius]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Hi T,

I know that neither of us are trying to nit-pick, but when you have 3,138 posts and the person asking the questions has 3 and haven`t even started building his oven, to say that he needs to saturate the oven to cook at lower temperature is over the top. Some of my best cooking experiences came about while I was curing my oven, once it because the well insulated monster it is now, is when the learning curve had to take place. Cooking with fire is easy, but heat management where there is no on-off switch takes a little getting use to. Don`t you agree?

[Tscarborough]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Yes, I often post from work and do not have time to give the full explanation a question like that deserves, so I hit it quick and then wait for the following posts to explain in detail.

What it boils down to is this:'

If you need a constant heat, as you do when baking bread or cooking a brisket, you can not maintain a constant temperature in the oven with a live fire on the upside of the saturation curve. When you try and cook with a short fire/un-saturated oven, the brick are pulling heat from the face of the brick into the mass, thus cooling and changing the temperature of the oven. If you are cooking something with direct fire, this is not an issue. If you want the oven to hold it's temp for 45 minutes while you cook 10#s of wet dough, or for 12 hours while the brisket turns to heaven, it is.

Most ovens involved with this forum are massively overbuilt for their actual use. 4" of masonry is way overkill for cooking 4 or 5 pizzas once or twice a month, so I encourage the use of the oven all the way through the heat profile, for 3 or 4 days of cooking. That requires a thorough heat soak of the mass.

[dakzaag]

Re: cooking at 300-400

Another really awesome suggestion is to build a fire wall inside the oven to provide a small cooking zone that is isolated from the direct flame of an active fire.

Richard Miscovich writes about this technique in his book From the Wood Fired Oven. (it is a fantastic book by the way)

It just takes a few fire brick dry stacked inside the oven to make a little area that can be used for more gentle heat. The big advantage is putting something in there and being able to walk away for a while vs always having to turn it to keep it from burning.

One of the most fascinating aspects of an oven for me is trying to coax as many items out of the oven from the smallest amount of wood.