Yesterday we decided to try the wood-fired oven for baking rather than pizza making. My personal goal is to master it for baking bread, but I think I have some insulation issues to address first. So we decided to make an Italian-inspired beef stew, originally inspired by the Italian (maybe) man from Papson’s Deli in Worcester. When I told him about my oven he started reminiscing and telling me about his childhood, telling me about a beef stew dish his mother used to make that was finished by adding pasta rice (also known as Orzo), something I’d never seen or heard of. So a couple of days ago I had a look at a neat blog post on an Italian beef stew (Stracotto di Manzo in Italian) and decided on making something similar. I also decided to try baking some more bread in the oven for a bit of practise, Focaccia being the obvious choice.
Our timings for the day were:
- 12:00 (mid day) start up the fire.
- 15:00 no more logs.
- 15:45 door shut, not many glowing embers so not much smoke.
- 16:30 focaccia in (oven around 250)
- 16:45 focaccia out (oven around 210)
- 16:45 beef stew in
- 20:00 orzo added to beef stew, focaccia back in to warm up (mistake!)
- 20:20 stew out (oven around 100)
The focaccia was ok but not great, for two reasons. First I should have used olive oil in the dough and didn’t since I never add any fat to any of the breads I make; but I should have done for this one! And secondly we dried it out a little when we warmed it up – it should have been cooked to serve fresh. (Possibly a third reason is we didn’t try to steam the oven which I always do with the house electric oven). But it wasn’t bad and went down a treat with the stew (and also the risotto that Toni made for all the veggies!). My score, 5 out of 10.
The stew was awesome! 8 out of 10! It was roughly as follows:
- 1.5kg stewing steak, seasoned and browned in olive oil, all placed in metal baking tray.
- 4 onions, sliced.
- 3/4 Claret (we forgot to buy Italian – sorry!)
- Big handfuls of freshly picked and chopped oregano, rosemary and thyme.
- Ground black pepper
- 0.5L beef stock
- Two tins of chopped tomatoes.
- Cover with foil, sit for a while.
If we’d added the whole bottle of wine, and used Italian instead of French, tweaked the seasoning slightly, and possibly a small amount of celery and/or other veg, this could have got 9/10! But for our first stew in the outdoor oven, and given it was made up by a vegetarian (!), it was awesome.
So we have a way to go before the oven will be able to cook bread in the morning after cooking pizza the night before. I think we need to get a load of insulation on the underneath of the base and also thicken up the door. Certainly the outside of the dome never gets very hot meaning the insulation is working a treat even when the inside is 400C or more.
The focaccia before going in:
The cooked focaccia:
The stew, after it had served up about 8 portions!
Until next time, chow!
Shad's Pad 