Chefs wax poetic over wood-burning fires

Owen Maass and his wood-burning oven have been getting to know each other over the last few months.
Maass is executive chef of the new restaurant M in Hyde Park, where burning wood is the predominant cooking heat source. Maass seems to be losing his heart to the massive, 10,000-pound oven from France.

“You can’t control this oven,” he says, sitting at a counter watching flames burn down to ash. “You don’t dominate it. You have to do a dance, create a relationship with it.”

He describes it as a girlfriend you have to treat nicely but also thinks it might be a bull that can be wrestled but never beaten.

More chefs are cooking with wood fires, and something about it sends them searching for metaphors and superlatives to explain their fascination. Maass says he could never go back to working in a restaurant without one.

Michael Paley of Metropole, who cooks on an open fireplace, says the stainless steel plancha grill he places on wood embers inside it is “the best piece of kitchen equipment I’ve ever used.”

And Jim Emig, owner and pit master of Jim Dandy BBQ in Sharonville, says that “wood smoke has some kind of effect on meat that no one has ever described scientifically.”

“It has to be called magic.”

Simple food shines with fire from wood

Mark Frommeyer, who bakes Blue Oven bread in a wood-fired oven, said the process, from cutting and splitting wood outdoors to baking and then selling finished bread is “almost spiritual, I like it so much.”

M and Metropole both make wood-fire cooking the center of their cuisine – Metropole with an open fireplace, M with a massive oven.

Other restaurants have been using wood for some time, including Boca in Oakley, which has both a wood grill and wood-burning oven. Senate and Abigail Street use wood grills. Pizza from wood-fired ovens is increasingly popular, and the surge of interest in “real” barbecue has made pit masters connoisseurs of wood.

In a high-tech world, when molecular gastronomy is big and technology can offer consistency and control in the kitchen, cooking over wood takes the chefs who love it in an opposite direction. It’s a backwards journey to the very origins of cooking.

More will be taking that backwards journey. One of the two restaurant spaces that Boca will open Downtown in the former Maisonette building will feature two wood grills, and Brad Bernstein of the Mike Fink is working on re-opening that paddlewheeler restaurant with a large wood-fired oven and grill as its center.

As M’s owner Alex Mchaikhi says, the oven creates a chic-casual feeling perfect for where dining is going these days. Wood is a way to make very simple food delicious.

Chefs say wood creates a char without burning, adds just a subtle kiss of smoke to dishes, cooks thin-crusted pizza with delicious, almost-burned bits and keeps smoked food moister.

“Vegetables are really, really good in the oven,” Maass says. “Partly it’s the heat, partly the flavor from the wood.”

Dan Wright, owner of Senate, cooks hot dogs and burgers over wood at Senate and large cuts like leg of lamb at Abigail Street, slicing it off as it cooks.

Paley loves his fireplace’s versatility. “We’re finding new ways every day to use it,” he says. They cook on a plancha, cook vegetables in the ashes, hang chicken from strings above the fire, roast and simmer.

Deciding to go with wood, however, creates cooking challenges unknown to gas or electric users.

First, it means finding a good wood supplier who delivers hardwood that is aged, cured and dried.

“We get ours from a guy named Ray, that’s all I can say,” says Jim Ghory, chef de cuisine at Boca.

“I consider the wood the most important thing about BBQ,” Emig says. “I’d be out of business without my supplier.”

Frommeyer supplies himself with wood, mostly from trees that have fallen on his 30-acre farm in Williamsburg. He hauls it, cuts it, splits it, stacks it, ages it and finishes it in a greenhouse. He began with an oven he made himself, using mud from his farm, but a few years ago he built a second oven that is highly efficient and can do a whole week’s worth of baking with one cord of wood.

'It's the hardest station in the kitchen'

Even with excellent wood, fire has to be maintained, the oven heated, unexpected temperature spikes dealt with. “It’s the hardest station in the kitchen. You’re always poking, turning, keeping it hot.” Ghory says.

At A Tavola on Vine Street, pizza is cooked in an oven made by Stefano Ferrara in Naples with firebricks made of ash from Mount Vesuvius. “The oven didn’t come with instructions,” says LeRoy Ansley, the kitchen manager. “It took a while to understand it.”

They cook pizzas at about 1,050 degrees. “We had a thermometer gun, but it broke. Now we just do it by feel,” Ansley says. “If we throw a log on, we can raise the temperature by 50 degrees right away.”

Emig, at the other end of the temperature spectrum, cooks meat for six to 20 hours and also goes on intuition. The smoke can be different every day, he says. “I read the smoke. I breath it in, taste it a little, with my mouth, my lungs. I know when there’s something wrong.”

The high heats wood can attain mean cooking is tricky, too.

At Boca, there’s been a fish dish on the menu since they’ve been in Oakley. “It’s a three-ingredient dish: branzino, lemon and oil. It’s the wood fire that makes it sing,” Ghory says. The branzino is marked on the grill and finished in the oven, which takes about two minutes and requires split-second timing. The grilled romaine salad takes about 25 seconds. “You cannot turn your back on it.”

Baking bread presents special challenges. At Blue Oven, a fire is built in the oven, then raked out. There are no burning flames while bread is baking. The trick is that the oven starts off extremely hot, then gradually cools. Each of their many varieties of bread has to be ready to go in at the moment the temperature is right: high-heat breads such as country white and Bad Boy first, then whole grain, and finally fruit breads.

“If we miss the heat window, we can’t go back,” Frommeyer says.

This kind of challenge is not a deterrent to chefs who’ve gone this route – in fact, they see it as a plus. “I think using wood fire creates a need for higher awareness from everyone in the kitchen. You have to be alert, detailed and pay attention at all times. That’s a good thing,” Bernstein says.

“I love doing things the hard way,” Paley says. “I love a challenge.”