Cooking with Fire: From Roasting on a Spit to Baking in a Tannur, Rediscovered Techniques and Recipes That Capture the Flavors of Wood-Fired Cooking

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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. 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. 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. This veggie barbecue dish is effort-free - just pop the potatoes on the coals and wait til meltingly soft Since our earliest antecedents were scavengers of animal carcasses left behind by predators much, much higher on the food chain, their ability to cook the Pleistocene equivalent of roadkill meant they could kill bacteria in spoiled meat, make it easier to digest and reap more developmental benefits from the food.

If the flames are cooking your meat and there are scorch or grill marks on it, you’re doing it wrong. Cooking with fire is primitive, sure, but it’s how we all began and it should not be considered anything lesser,” Hastie said. “If anything, the reverse is true.

Choosing the right wood

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. Some of my favorite foods to cook over an open flame are foods that are meant to be cooked over an open flame. You may have tried to make zesty, smoky baba ghanouj, baingan bharta, or shakshuka on your stove, but the tepid, smokeless heat offered by electric appliances just can’t cut the mustard next to truly fire-cooked foods. I’ve found that the searing heat possible with a cast-iron skillet and a direct flame makes for amazing naan and pita. Finally, one of my favorite ways to prepare a lamb or goat curry is to roast a whole leg directly on the grate. Once nicely seared, it can be cut into bite-sized cubes and added to your simmering curry sauce, spices, and vegetables for an unforgettable dish. Cooking On Wood Stove The long-term benefits of a cleaner-burning wood stove, even when fully accepted by a household, are uncertain. Stoves that burn cleanly and efficiently in the laboratory, under standardized conditions, may not sustain their performance over years of everyday use. Deep in the western highlands of Guatemala, where the Mayan language of Mam is spoken more frequently than Spanish, a series of long-running public-health studies has measured the effects of improved wood-burning cookstoves on childhood health. An international team of researchers led by Kirk Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, found that while the new stoves did improve household air quality and reduce the frequency of childhood illnesses such as pneumonia, the indoor air pollution was still far above guidelines set by the World Health Organization. The team, now led by Lisa Thompson of Emory University, recently studied if and how families can be encouraged to adopt three-burner gas stoves—which have a comparable carbon footprint and, of course, emit no smoke at all. Thompson and a network of collaborators are now expanding this research to India, Peru, and Rwanda, studying how gas-stove adoption—and associated improvements in household air quality—affects the health of mothers and children.

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.

Follow our guide to getting crisp, fluffy baked potatoes, then try one of our new toppings for a filling supper All Offers Kitchenware Offers Homeware Offers Outdoor Living Offers Clearance Dry:Soon Heated Airer Bundles Spend more, save more on selected knives Three more chapters invite us to travel and explore the recipes that have developed from Kristian’s roots in Finland – think freshwater fish, rustic breads and garden-fresh vegetables, with lots of ideas for vegetarians as well as meat eaters. Then we move south through the street-food influences of London where the first Ooni was invented, spicy pizza toppings, kebabs, hotdogs – more veggies – and even a Caribbean-inspired, rum-soaked, flambéed pineapple.