How to cook successfully in a wood-fired oven ?

The traditional wood-fired oven is an exceptional tool that offers you endless possibilities. Cooking over a wood fire provides a unique flavour to many dishes such as pizzas, grilled meats, bread, simmered recipes, and more. But your oven can also easily be turned into a dryer or smoker, simply by using accumulated heat. From lighting the back oven to combining different cooking modes, Four Grand-Mère provides you with some essential tips for cooking like a chef !

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The two types of wood-fired cooking

Cooking in a Roman wood-fired oven has been a popular technique since ancient times. Fortunately, it is now much easier to do thanks to efficient, attractive, and easy-to-assemble wood-fired ovens, such as those made by Four Grand-Mère.

To rediscover all the flavours of yesteryear, you can cook in a closed or open wood-fired oven:

• Cooking with the door open, for pizzas and grilled foods with an authentic taste.
• Cooking with the door closed, for example for rustic breads and slow-cooked dishes.

Open oven cooking with flames

This involves cooking over high heat, with flames and embers. You must leave the door open so that the fire can be properly supplied with oxygen and produce nice, long flames.

This open oven cooking method is ideal for pizzas, grilled meats and fish, and generally for all foods that can be seared over a flame and cook quickly.
Depending on the model, it is possible to cook with the oven door open after only 45 minutes to 1 hour of preheating!

When the oven is at the right temperature for high-heat cooking, only 2 or 3 rows of bricks remain dark (approximately 10 cm) at the base of the vault.
After pushing the embers to the edge or aside , you can place pizzas, tarte flambées, various meats for barbecuing, so on… on it.

However, be careful: this cooking method is fast, but not always even. You must therefore keep an eye on it through the door, which should be left open.

Slow baking with the door closed, without flames

To cook food in a closed oven, you must wait until the embers have turned to ashes and the temperature inside has become relatively uniform.

When the oven is heated to the right temperature, this is visually apparent as the oven becomes “white” from top to bottom, because all the bricks are roughly at the same temperature.
Natural pyrolysis has taken place, and the oven vault is clean again.
After emptying the ashes and cleaning the floor, wait 15 to 30 minutes for the temperature to even out across the entire floor before baking the dishes in the oven with the door closed.

This slow cooking method, made possible by the accumulated heat in the refractory material and then returned, is ideal for pies, roasted meats and poultry, bread, stews, gratins, brioches, etc.

The cooking temperature varies greatly depending on the dish being prepared. It takes 482°F (250°C) to cook a leg of lamb, but 212°F (100 to 120 °C) to 248°F is sufficient for a crème renversée.

How do you light a wood-fired oven ?

To heat your wood-fired oven properly, it is best to allow plenty of time.

Allow approximately 45 minutes for ovens in the Design and Ardente ranges and 1 hour 30 minutes for brick ovens in the Excellence range.
Indeed, as the material offers better inertia, it takes longer to heat up.
You can prepare newspaper, twigs, kindling, and dry logs of suitable wood species, such as hornbeam, beech, or oak, in advance.

Before lighting the fire, place the twigs or newspaper at the front of the floor, and the kindling and quality logs on top.

As soon as the fire has caught and begins to heat the oven, push it toward the back or to the side so that you can use the surface of the floor to bake.
Then make sure to feed the fire regularly by adding small pieces of wood that burn easily, one piece at a time.

Little by little, you will learn to “tame” the wood, like pizza chefs who place new logs near the embers, not on top of them. This way, you avoid feeding a bed of embers that is still sufficient and wasting wood.

A few tips to optimize the use of your oven

Monitor the temperature closely

To monitor the temperature throughout the heating and cooking process, our Ardente and Excellence range ovens are supplied equipped with either a thermometer built directly into the vault or a high-performance laser thermometer.

For other ranges, a laser thermometer shows you the surface temperature of the vault or floor of the oven, which is useful information for quick cooking in an open oven.
We strongly recommend using one of these modern solutions to accurately measure the temperature and ensure your cooking is always a success.

If not, here are some tips from our grandmothers for determining temperature without a thermometer.

Combine open-door cooking and slow cooking

Thanks to their high-performance insulation, parabolic shape, and thick vault, Grand-Mère ovens have excellent thermal inertia.

In practical terms, after maintaining the ideal temperature for open oven cooking, the temperature drops very slowly, by approximately 7°C per hour, when the insulated door is closed.
To treat your loved ones while making the most of the accumulated heat, the ideal solution is to plan gourmet weekends, gradually baking several dishes that require increasingly lower temperatures.

Some examples of baking days

For example, after grilling some sardines and continuing to heat the oven for a batch of pizzas, you can easily follow up  a few hours later, once the oven has cooled down a little, with a variety of dishes that can be cooked with the door closed:

• Roast beef (250°C).
• Bread (240°C).
• Gratin dauphinois (180°C).
• Ratatouille (160°C).
• Chocolate cake (150°C).
• Meringues (80°C)…

The quality and inertia of our wood-fired ovens are such that you can easily organize an open-oven lunch and a closed-oven dinner with a single heating cycle.

Do you prefer to cook food in an open oven throughout the day? By closing the oven doors after dinner over the dying embers, you can toast bread for breakfast the next day on the oven floor, and even bake a biscuit. The heat will still be more than enough !

Using your wood-fired oven to dry or smoke food

Certain foods can be smoked in a wood-fired oven, such as salmon, trout, bacon, duck breast, etc.

In most cases, the food should be placed on a raised rack in the center of the oven floor.
To generate the necessary smoke, you can form a cord of dry beech sawdust around the edge of the sole, right up against the vault. Lit at one end, this cord will burn very slowly for about ten hours, producing a lot of smoke and little heat.

Leave the insulated door in place, but slightly ajar to allow a small amount of air to enter.

Another more modern technique involves using a cold smoke generator, as in our recipe for smoking trout or salmon fillets.
You can also use the residual heat from the oven to dry fruit and vegetables at around 60°C, and mushrooms at 40°C or above.