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Working with some of the best live fire chefs in the country. Lots of research, going to evens like Meatopia which is like my annual pilgrimage. Working with chefs like Ben Quinn and Simon Stallard here in Cornwall, and then at Meatopia working with some amazing international live fire chefs. I got to work with Lennox Hastie who’s an Australian chef and the stuff that you learn with him in a day is more than some people learn in a lifetime. As for possible dishes to cook on a woodstove, think low and slow. This cooking surface is ideal for many winter greats, such as simmered stews, toothsome beans, and all-day cooked bone broth. I’ve also used my woodstove to slowly cook down pints and pints of apple and pumpkin butter without burning it. You’ve cooked over fire at food festivals such as Meatopia in London and on the beach at St Ives Food Festival. What do you cook when looking to show off what’s possible with live fire? The course provides ideas and inspiration whether you are travelling light in the wilderness or you have access to outdoor kitchen equipment.
Cooking with fire can be a fun and rewarding experience, but it’s important to always prioritize safety. Make sure to keep a fire extinguisher nearby and never leave your fire unattended. Use long-handled tools to avoid getting too close to the flames, and wear protective gear like oven mitts and aprons. It’s also important to properly clean and maintain your cooking equipment to prevent accidents and ensure optimal performance. By following these safety measures, you can enjoy the art of cooking with fire without putting yourself or others at risk. It’s really the offset cooking. You can’t generate the same flavour smoking with smoke chips as you can smoking over an open fire. There’s not that depth of flavour. It creates a flavour profile that smoke chips try to replicate, but they produce a much harsher flavour. Smoking over an open fire is much more subtle and has more depth. With the smoking chips it’s like “BANG! SMOKE!” but when you’re smoking over wood that has been soaked in water so it’s generating its own steam as well, it creates a deeper flavour. Offset cooking also means you tend to be cooking low and slow, and drawing out more flavours.Cooking over an open fire is the oldest and most primitive method of cooking known, with glowing red flames and smoky ambers mostly lending themselves to frying, grilling and boiling. When camping in the great outdoors, the part I look forward to the most is setting up my little outdoor kitchen. If you’re a scout, you’ll almost certainly know how to start a small campfire. Otherwise, there are plenty of modern, portable open fire cooking stoves available to take along. It’s time to get creative too, since open fire cooking sets us all with a whole new cooking challenge. In some ways, this step comes first, since you will have sourced the meat before you cook wherever you have chosen. Meat from the Dorset Meat Company will of course have been aged and prepared perfectly, so you know the ingredients are perfect, and the rest is down to you and your cooking. Steaks are the simplest options, or try meat prepared with your own marinades or rubs beforehand. Do as much preparation as possible beforehand, to limit the labour in the field, and how many utensils you need to take with you. Larger cuts of meat will cook well, either on a spit or ‘Asado’, but will take longer to cook, and need careful management of heat. Where to light your fire
Ahead of his upcoming course we took the excuse to head up the road to St Kew and sit down with Andi in the historic bar after a busy lunch service to find out a bit more about his food, what attendees can expect on March 7th, and how you can add a bit of cooking with fire to your culinary skill set. Ah, the great outdoors. The place we really want to be. Food just tastes better cooked outside and over a fire. We used to go camping for the weekend. Then, we got campers. Oh, the luxury of having a bed, a small galley, and a table that turns into a bed. Building, lighting and controlling a cooking fire is crucial to creating delicious outdoor food and the course covers this in detail. We also look at different types of wood to burn for the ultimate outdoor food. Cooking over the coals of a fire delivers the most wonderful flavour to your food. It's the way humans have been cooking for thousands of years, and still offers an almost primal sense of satisfaction. We love to use this technique when grilling vegetables, meat, and seafood.
Cooking
In the 1970s, a major earthquake in Guatemala brought international aid groups to the country, where they learned about the health and environmental costs of open cooking fires. Since then, a diffuse network of engineers and philanthropists has invented and distributed hundreds of different kinds of improved stoves throughout the developing world, ranging from tiny, gas-powered camping stoves to wood-fired ranges large enough to feed a dozen. Thanks to an initial investment by StoveTeam International, Guerra now owns a factory in central Guatemala—one of several similar operations in Mexico and Central America—that manufactures eight types of improved cookstoves, and he sells them to both aid groups and individuals throughout the country. His very first stove, which he built by hand almost a decade ago, is still in daily use nearby, in Rosa de Sapeta’s kitchen. De Sapeta says that her family used to avoid the smoke-filled kitchen, but now, she says, “I have company when I cook.”
Whether you want to start introducing cooking over fire into your regular repertoire, or simply up your barbecue game in preparation for the summer, Andi’s course is going to cover all bases. We have just a few spaces remaining. We like to start with something light and soft that burns easily. Once the fire is burning well, you can start to feed it hardwood, which will burn hotter and for a longer period of time. If you don’t have hardwood, you just need to feed your fire more frequently. This winter, inspired by the great Argentinian chef Francis Mallmann’s ‘seven fires’ we are creating a clearing dedicated to the art of cooking over an open fire. The area will be covered allowing us to teach in all weathers and use a wider range of cooking with fire techniques. This exciting new resource will be up and running for all our 2021 courses. With your fire so prepared, you can now cook several delightfully simple dishes. Potatoes can be roasted in their skins. Simply poke a few vent holes through the skins (so the potatoes don’t explode!), dig some trenches in white-hot ashes, and bury them until done. The outer skins will likely be burned to a crisp, but the inner white flesh will be delectable with just a pinch of salt. Your choice of wood will be driven by what you are trying to cook, and of course what you can source. For simple cooking of steaks, charcoal is the simplest option. It creates balanced heat, has a neutral flavour, and hardly any smoke. Any charcoal you use should be sustainably sourced, and avoid the instant type as it contains chemicals and accelerants which will impart undesirable flavours.If you are using wood, make sure you don’t use anything poisonous, such as oleander, or any treated timber. Any fruit wood, nut wood, or grape prunings are fabulous. Most importantly, your wood needs to be dry. The last chapter covers Scotland – now home to Kristian, Darina and the Ooni HQ – with breakfast-themed pizzas, seafood dishes and roasted meals inspired by the mountains and rugged coastline of this dramatic country. About Ooni There is something to be said about cooking a steak directly laid upon the coals and rigorously tending to the progression of the way the steak will finish off. This also brings out some ancestral primordial wonderings of how we even came about cooking in the first place. Was it an accident? Did part of the harvest fall onto the flames of their heat source and it just worked out to be a great thing? Did our ancestors become obsessed with wondering about what they could do next to make their other foods over a fire? I don’t care how it came to fruition; I am just glad it did. Tips for Cooking over a Fire Choose the right fuel for your fire. Cooking with fire is one of my preferred ways of cooking.I am unsure if it is because I find comfort and familiarity with a campfire or because food just seems to taste better.It’s just like the way a hotdog you cook at home is never as good as the one from the ballpark, or the one you cook over an open flame. Cooking Over a Fire
Before moving to St Kew Inn, you cooked in various notable kitchens around North Cornwall. What is it about cooking in Cornwall that you enjoy so much? The produce. You’re getting ingredients from the sea to the kitchen in a matter of minutes, not hours. With the local connections that I’ve made now with people like George Cleave the fishmonger in Port Isaac, his fish is at the kitchen door within minutes of being landed, which is awesome. The metal top of a cast-iron woodstove gets hot, obviously, and many folks who use wood heat keep a kettle of water atop their stoves to humidify the dry interior air. But if you can boil water, you can make a surprising number of simple dishes as well. The trouble with gas barbecues is the fact that it’s essentially the gas is just heating up a steel hotplate with a grill on it. You want to avoid that grill mark flavour because you’re literally just branding it.Another way to manage temperature is to vary the distance between the food and the embers. You can also rearrange embers, and align logs as they burn to create a larger surface area for more efficient heat emission. Cooking with fire is an age-old tradition that has stood the test of time. Cooking with fire is a primal and satisfying experience that has been practiced for centuries. Whether you’re grilling, smoking, or roasting, cooking with fire can add a unique flavor and texture to your food. With the right techniques and tools, you can master the art of cooking with fire and impress your friends and family with delicious, smoky dishes. Discover the art of cooking with fire with our expert tips and techniques. Fresh from Scotland, the Ooni team are proud to present their very first cookbook, Ooni: Cooking with Fire. Invented by Kristian Tapaninaho with his partner Darina Garland, Ooni ovens are inspired by Italian pizza ovens but they’re super-fast to heat, and super-speedy to cook in, and they wanted to take this opportunity to share their story, recipes and inspiration for great outdoor cooking. New cookstoves aren’t always adopted so easily and enthusiastically, however. For a stove to be fully accepted by a household, both stove and fuel must be affordable, accessible, and easy to use—goals that aren’t easy to achieve simultaneously, as the Pérez family has found. And in places where the social status of women is still tightly tied to the quality of their cooking, woe to the stove whose output doesn’t measure up to local culinary standards. “When I started this work, I thought it was just a matter of choices and appliances,” says Radha Muthiah, the chief executive officer of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which was founded in 2010 and is hosted by the United Nations Foundation, with support from public and private funds. “But as you get into it, you realize there are so many different considerations.” Muthiah and other stove experts emphasize that there is no single ideal stove or ideal fuel, as every household, every community, and every culture has different needs and priorities: a stove designed for rural Guatemala may well be completely impractical in Nairobi.
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