“Gilda”, and new brother, “Gatsby”, have such “glowing” personalities (sorry), we just had to give these enormous copper objet d’art, names. If you are behind our van, as we haul either oven, you will see people leaning out of their window instagraming, giving us the thumbs up, or just craning their neck wondering, “what the heck…?”. Once at our destination, often a crowd of curious onlookers gather, drawn over by the aroma of burning hickory wood – you can smell the oven long before you can see her/him. Folks of all ages seem to have a fascination with fire and this primitive form of cooking. Live-fire cooking is an endless conversation piece and questions abound, so, today we are blogging about Gilda and Gatsby.
Cooking in a wood-fire is a soulful experience. Fires are temperamental and moody, and getting along with them requires patience if you want to produce non-charred or half-scorched/ half-raw foods. On the other hand, the best food you have ever tasted can be prepared in a wood-fire, so please feel encouraged to give live-fire cooking a solid try.
Let’s started with recommended reading:
From the Wood-Fired Oven New and Traditional Techniques for Cooking and Baking With Fire by Richard Miscovich
and
The Bread Builders
Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens by Alan Scott and Daniel Wing
I would suggest starting simple and low cost. Try taking the mud oven building course with Ciril Hitz of Breadhitz in Rehoboth, MA. If you lose interest in a couple of years your oven will wash away, and if you can’t live without it, go to a landscape nursery that sells pre-assembled brick ovens, or buy the materials – and build it yourself.
Back to Gilda and Gatsby. We are frequently asked questions and don’t always have the time to provide an in-depth answer. This is not a pizza you throw in the oven and walk away from. Vasileios, our fire master has to continuously turn and shift the pie into different quadrants of the oven to give the dough the telltale leopard speckling.
The floor and the peak of the interior oven have different temperatures. The fire is started early morning (or the night before an event) to help us achieve our temperature range from 800 – 1200 degrees. (The temperature is measured with a laser thermometer.) In order to get the floor evenly heated, the coals are raked over the bed. When we are ready to cook the pizzas, the deck is cleaned with the fire-proof push broom. The pizzas are carefully and skillfully slid in.
The oven can accommodate up to six to nine pies, we tend to bake between 5 – 6 at a time. The pizzas bake up in a mere 90-seconds, and are best eaten soon after they come out. Best to chow down within 20-minutes. After that, the pizza’s taste profile is not at its best.
Our ovens are 100% organic – made from Kaolin clay. “Terre Blanch” is French for “white earth”. This is an amazing refractory clay which contains aluminum oxide which allows them to be heat resistant up to 1,630 degrees Celsius. There is no iron oxide in the clay to effect the taste – and no asbestos which can be found in some brick ovens.
Terre Blanch is quarried with full respect to the environment in the heart of Crozes Hermitage Vineyard, Provence, France. The quarry was formed millions of years ago and it is used in its purest form – just the way it comes out. Nothing added or and no natural qualities refined away. Terre Blanch is the earthy element in the cooking ceramics used during the Roman period – so a time-tested material!
The exterior of the oven was crafted by a copper artisan, who signed our oven. The oven sits on a teak bed with great shocks and struts. The oven can rotate 360 degrees which allows to configure into almost any space, and it can be raised, lowered and tilted so pizzas lie flat. The oven stays warm for seven days without the addition of extra wood. As it cools over night, we can bake bread the following day. Then granola and dried fruit later on.
From buying premium wood for the oven, to the special local and natural ingredients we grow or source out locally to put on the pizzas, we do our best to make our pizzas special for you!