Cooking with Fire

Contents

The Recipes

Chapter 1: A Fire and a Stick

Back to Basics

Getting Started: Roasting on a Stick

Toasting Cheese

Roasting in Ashes and Coals

Baking Bread under the Ashes

Chapter 2: A Few Simple Tools

Spit Roasting

How to Make an Efficient and Pleasant Roasting Hearth

The Spit

Roast on a String

Cooking on Skewers

The Grill

The Schwenker

The Plank

Searing with a Hot Iron

Chapter 3: Pots and Pans

The Griddle in All Its Guises

Cakes on the Griddle

Tortillas

Griddled Breads of Northwestern Europe

British Griddle Breads

Other Things to Cook on the Griddle

The Griddle on Steroids: The Argentine Infiernillo

Pots over Fire

The Clay Pot

Iron Pots and Pans

Shallow Frying

Deep Frying

Baking Bread in a Cast-Iron Pot

Chapter 4: More Gear

The Tannur, the Furnace, and the Potager

The Cast-Iron Cookstove

Smoke

Barbeque, Two Ways

Chapter 5: Retained Heat

Underground Inspiration from around the World

The Earth Oven: Cooking in a Hole in the Ground

The Masonry Oven

Building a Basic Wood-Fired Oven

Getting Ready to Bake

Heating an Oven

Cooking with an Oven Full of Fire

Getting Ready for Pizza

Using Retained Heat — The Cooling Curve

Bread for the Wood-Fired Oven

Natural Leavening for Your Wood-Fired Bread

Natural Leavening Q & A

Overnight Cooking Traditions

Overnight in a New England Brick Oven

Resources, References, and Details

Acknowledgments

Other Storey Titles You Will Enjoy

About the Author

Copyright

---

The Recipes

Chapter 1: A Fire and a Stick

Toasted Cheese, Old-School

Raclette Supper

Romani Bacon

Hearth Bannock

Pine-Needle Mussels

Chapter 2: A Few Simple Tools

Master Recipe and Technique: Roasting a Small Whole Animal

Making a Sauce in the Dripping Pan

Roast Pork Loin (Cormarye)

Spit-Roasted Stuffed Striped Bass

Twine-Roast Leg of Lamb

The Best Chicken Salad Ever

Beef, Red Pepper, and Mushroom Skewers

Fish Kebabs with Fennel Salad

Beef Heart Kebab Wraps

Simplest Grilled Chicken

Butterflied Leg of Lamb

An Oyster Roast

Jerked Pork Loin

Saarländischer Schwenkbraten

Planked Fish

Burnt Cream

Flip

Hot Poker Mustard

Pebble-Seared Parsley Sauce

Chapter 3: Pots and Pans

Pita

Shrak

Flatbread for Wraps

Three Boreks

Version 1: Half-Moon Borek

Version 2: Crispy Mushroom Borek

Version 3: Sweet Crispy Borek, or Campfire Baklava

Chive Pancakes

Corn Tortillas

Flour Tortillas

Protohistoric Multigrain Flatbread

Oatcake, or Havercake

Bannock

Hannah Glasse's Muffins

Cream Scones

Just-for-Fun Crackers

Blistered Vegetables

Salt-Roasted Shrimp

Sea Scallop Lollipops with Spiced Olives

Salt-Roasted New Potatoes

Buttered Gooseberries

The Mess o' Greens

Plymouth Fish Chowder

Beef Shanks with Chile and Cranberry Beans

Gaetano's Fried Pizza

Cajun Rice and Eggs

Magyar Migas

Spaghetti alla Carbonara

Fried Smelts with Rhode Island Relish

Olie-Koecken

Classic White Bread for Cast-Iron Baking

Buttermilk Biscuits

Chapter 4: More Gear

Naan

Glögg

Corn Oysters

Broiled Filet or Porterhouse with Maitre d'hotel Butter

Boston Brown Bread

Smoked Fish

Finfish

Scallops

Smoked Turkey

Pork Belly or Jowl Meat

Back-to-Basics Spareribs

Chapter 5: Retained Heat

Bean-Hole Beans

Broiled Mixed Peppers

Roast Pepper Salad

Salsa Ranchera

Quick Huevos Rancheros

Green Sauce

Spicy Little Necks

Cajun Shrimp

Pizza Dough

Pizza Topping Combinations

Arugula, Blue Cheese, and Pepitas

Anchovies, Walnuts, and Parsley

Salt Cod, Capers, and Red Onion

Flammekeuche

Pide

Dying Fire Chicken Roast

Roasted Eggplant

Baba Ghanoush

Roasted Eggplant Appetizer

Vienna Bread or Rolls

Naturally Leavened Bread

Lahmajoon

Caraway Rye Bread

Brown Bread

Real Crackers for Chowder

Limpa

Clay Pot Vegetables

Roasted Tomatoes

Roasted Tomato Butter

Clay Pot Chicken with Garlic

Mussakhan

Austin Cake

Granola

Almond Meringue Cookies

Adafina

Hamine Eggs

Ful Medames

Indian Pudding

Overnight Oatmeal

---

Chapter 1

A Fire and a Stick

It all starts with the fire.

Humans have been at this cooking business for a very long time — as long as 1.9 million years, according to a recent and brilliant reinterpretation of hominid development that positions cooked food at the crux of a major evolutionary watershed. Thanks to our capability of controlling fire and applying it to food, we developed a smaller digestive tract, and smaller mouths and teeth. More importantly, we saved hours a day in chewing time, freeing us up to do things like invent bread, pottery, beer, kebabs, bellows, tamales, accounting, and cheese.

One million, nine hundred thousand years. That's hundreds of millennia we've been cooking, while adapting our understanding of fire and its interactions with food to all kinds of changing conditions. We humans have cooked our way into and through ice ages, deforestation and desertification, falling seas and rising seas, global migrations, mass extinctions of megafauna, the domestication of plants and animals, wars, displacements, and enslavement. And that's all before written history began.

Archaeology hints at some of the rich culinary traditions and ingenious foodways practices of bygone cultures over the millennia. Among some living cultures, a strong oral tradition still preserves food techniques and knowledge a century or more old. But our earliest written recipes are only a few thousand years old, which means that most of the vast spectrum of past human cooking traditions is unknowable to us.

Back to Basics

In the first section of this book, we'll consider using fire for cooking at its most elemental level, without the intermediaries of pots and pans, spits and grills, griddles and ovens. Just live fire and a stick.

Why cook without pottery and metal? First, it's a great way to reintroduce yourself to fire. Spending some quality time with fire, while observing and manipulating it and its relationship with food without any technological barriers, is a great way to understand this primordial element. Regardless of what you cook, you pay attention differently when it's just the fire and the food.

Plus, it's fun; there's a reason we liked to cook things on sticks when we were kids. Oddly, in our culture, it's unusual for grownups to continue the practice. But, with the right group, it's a very social experience. Everyone around the fire is involved in producing their own meal, often at a leisurely pace.

And last, it develops respect for the millions of cooks who have gone before: parching grains on hearths, cooking roots or eggs in hot ashes, roasting bits of meat on sticks. All of these techniques require skill and attention to perfect; once you can cook without tools, the rest is cake.

Ultimately, nothing beats taking on a fun cooking project with a bunch of friends or launching some crazy food production as an entertainment at a social event. But to nurture the relationship that makes all this possible, I recommend spending some quality time alone with fire first. Observe how it behaves in different settings with different fuels, and how it reacts to small changes you make to its arrangement, and then, how it works to cook your food. If you've done a lot of grilling, or are already really good at building fires, you may feel like this exercise doesn't apply to you. But I feel that there's always something new to understand and there's never anything to be lost from the quiet, active contemplation of fire.

Making a Fire — Before You Start

This first series of exercises may be undertaken indoors at a fireplace, or better yet, outdoors on the ground.

Assemble everything you need at arm's reach before you strike a match. For the fire I have in mind, that would be kindling (an armload of dry sticks and twigs of varying sizes), in an amount you can gather in a basket or box or bucket in five minutes' time while wandering around the yard. If that doesn't describe where you live, you may want to get in the habit of traveling with such a receptacle so that you can snag kindling as you cross its path. For the purpose of today's exercise, pick up both hardwood and softwood materials; both have their place in firemaking and cooking. Later on in the exercise, you'll need three or four pieces of split hardwood. You will find a sturdy, sharp knife handy. And, of course, you will need an igniter: matches, lighter, ember from another fire, magnifying lens, bow drill, or flint and steel.

Kindling Your Fire

If you're at an indoor fireplace, open the damper in the flue, and shove any andirons or any other unnecessary appurtenances out of the way. Indoors or out, have a quick look to make sure that flammable things are not contiguous to your fire zone. Dried-flower arrangements, the Christmas tree, a pile of leaves, your double-knit leisure suit . . . all these should be moved away from the fire area. I have seen each one of these items burn, and you don't want to be surprised by that kind of sudden ignition.

There is no need to be dogmatic about a fire-making approach, except that you should expect to adapt your strategy to the materials at hand. This is a way that works for me, given the type of materials described above.

Bearing in mind that fire is composed of just as much oxygen as fuel, lay one softwood stick in the middle of the hearth and set another so that one end sits across the end of the first one. Where they cross, lean a number of very small sticks or twigs.

Take a sturdy knife and pare off some fine strips of softwood; or, shred up the inner bark from a cedar tree, or pull apart a chunk of white birch bark, or drop in a handful of dry pine needles. Top this puffy pile with a few more medium sticks to anchor it and give the fire something to catch on to.

Have a bunch of broken-up dry sticks handy to feed the fire, as well as the next size of fuel you plan to burn, in this case, just larger sticks, broken or sawn or chopped to a manageable length. If you have the proper tool — a big sturdy knife works — splitting dry sticks into smaller splints really increases the likelihood of their igniting easily.

Look at your fire setup. At its nexus should be something that looks like a little bird's nest of puffy wood fibers; touch your match there to kindle your fire. When it appears to have caught, add a few more small pieces without collapsing your structure. Visualize oxygen coming up from beneath your little nest of fire, driving the flames into the fuel. Be patient and allow each addition to truly catch; introduce slightly larger pieces gradually and precisely. As this arrangement burns and collapses, it will ignite the foundation sticks below.

Making a Coal Bed

If you have begun to add some hardwood sticks to your little fire, you've already taken the first step in getting a real cooking fire going — creating some coals. As inconsequential as these first tiny coals may seem, the success of most hearth cooking operations basically comes down to having the right volume of those glowing lumps of smoldering carbon in the right place at the right time. So let's make some more. When you have an actively burning small fire composed of sticks that are large enough to support them, place a couple of pieces of split hardwood on the structure. They should be more or less parallel, and nearly touching, over the center of the fire, so that the flames and oxygen from below are forced to pass between them, hastening ignition of the new wood.

Experiment with this proximity phenomenon as you add more fuel and adjust the fire with a stick or poker. Notice what happens when you push things closer together or pull them further apart. You'll find that there is an optimal distance, determined by a great many variables and worthy of an honors physics project, which provides for the most efficient combustion of fuel in any particular fire. No two fires will be exactly the same in this regard. Fortunately, you don't have to resort to some sort of algorithm to calculate this factor. In fact, the knowledge is almost intuitive; some folks make absolutely perfect fires all their lives without even thinking about it for a second. I describe the phenomenon because it is the first thing to look at when a fire is not behaving to your liking. Wood piled too close together on an uncertain fire will tend to smother it, especially if the air flow from below is choked off. On the other hand, fuel scattered too widely deprives the fire of the intensity it should have; it's as if you are nursing several small fires rather than enabling one focused act of combustion. When the wood is just the right distance apart, and oxygen is whooshing into it from beneath, your fire is burning optimally.

Getting Started: Roasting on a Stick

Artfully add a few more pieces of hardwood, and you have a cooking fire underway. It's just a matter of time until a small coal bed forms beneath the logs, all ready to perform its alchemy on a dish of food. However, before we get to the sublime, let's start with the ridiculous: the marshmallow. That's right, the lowest common denominator of campfire cooking.

Well, the marshmallow, silly as it is, is a great learning tool. Its sugary ingredients make it highly responsive to heat, so that to toast one is like roasting real food on fast-forward. Yet it is rare to observe a marshmallow-cook, adult or child, who takes the task seriously. Most marshmallows go down in flames, an inevitable end for a ball of aerated sugars suspended thoughtlessly over a pine inferno. But every now and again I see a crafty and patient individual who firmly plants the confection on a greenwood stick, who scopes out the fire for a perfect little hearth of coals at its base, and who turns and turns the rigid gummy cylinder into a perfectly molten blob encased in a crisp, even, golden-brown skin. Meanwhile a dozen others nearby have been immolated over the fire with protests of, "This is how I like to do it!"

So, give it a try, if you're not already one of the patient and crafty ones. Even if you do like marshmallows charred on the exterior and cold and hard at the core (and I am skeptical), accept the challenge of observing what you are doing when you cook them perfectly. Experiencing that process attentively will allow you to approach roasting anything — a chicken, a hog, an eggplant, a fish (things you really don't want carbonized on the outside and raw in the middle) — with a refreshed understanding of the task.

Correct Heat, Sufficient Support

Here are a few technical aspects to consider when roasting the marshmallow, applicable also to more involved roasting projects: