.. and one of my darling favourites.
Category Archives: Video
A Handmade Oven, built by The Big Man himself
For the last month I have had the pleasure of having my father stay. He travelled many thousands of miles to help us build our oven.
This would be his 4th oven. They tend to be a relatively common sight from where I am from, and one very famous pizzeria in particular in Willunga has even a book about it. Although you can buy them in kit form online from various Italian outlets and through Jamie Oliver, they are simple enough and can be made yourself if you know what you are doing. When Dad said he could come over to build mine, I was over the moon.
The premise of making the oven is a simple and primitive one. Using bricks, fire or otherwise, to create a dome, the bricks hold themselves into position, and retain the heat from the fire within. The idea is to maintain the heat within the oven as much as possible so you are able to utilise the energy and heat throughout the day so this is done by creating an additional skin and insulating within it. Once we will be cooking throughout the day, the heat generated will be able to cook breads in the morning, pizzas throughout the day and evening and then we can slow braise overnight.
Wanting to make as economical oven as possible, we sourced some kiln bricks from Coventry which we used for the majority of the first skin. These bricks weighed as much as marble, and it took me a full 2 days to cut through the 200 that we bought. Although we had planned to use them for the entire first skin, the sheer weight of them couldn’t withstand gravity once we got past a certain point.
Once the all important first skin was done we seemed to speed up somewhat. The second skin is critical if we wish to make bread. Those wedges you can see above are all important, which allows us to go around in a relatively tight circle using half bricks. They are used to create tension between the bricks allowing you to use cement only on the outside, and maintaining a clean, cement free internal wall.
I’m going to wait for a bit to show you the final oven, fully completed. These photo’s are of the first skin and the second skin partly done.. But below is the great moment of pulling down the roof..
Fireside Chats – Graham talks restaurants
Fireside Chats – Matt talks meat
Our resident curer, Matt Bedell had a chat with us about the progress of our curing this week.
Jimmy Sneed is back!
The second part of the Jimmy Sneed chat is now online for your viewing pleasure..
A chat with Jimmy Sneed, a fortunate run-in
Jimmy Sneed is from the old guard. Chef by profession and self confessed soul-saver by trade…
The art of the bartender
The American cocktail has history. From the time when people mixed their booze with hard spirits so that they didn’t get sick to the moment when alcohol was banned completely but really only went underground, there has always seemed something compelling about the relationship of flavours that the great cocktail makers are privy to.
Good cocktail people are worth travelling to find. Lucky then, that we’ve done some of the hard work for you.
New Orleans Eaters: a chat with Sara Roahen
It’s pretty hard not to talk about food in New Orleans. Everyone has an opinion, and everyone has a recommendation (not all wanted, but that’s what you get for asking) One of the best chats we had was with Sara Roahen, the lady who wrote ‘Gumbo Tales’ and a lady that spoke about New Orleans eating with such eloquence that I couldn’t get my nose out of it (the book that is)
She met us at Hanson’s Sno-Ball shop in Uptown. For those that haven’t experienced the beauty of shaven, flavoured ice: you should, it’s better than it sounds. Mine was lime and satsuma. S had a cream of root-beer. It was better than all Sno-balls/ Sno-cones I have had and probably will have for some time. She had written about this in the book, but at the time I wasn’t able to comprehend why a Sno-ball shop can have people lining up the street for some frozen flavoured ice, but there, on that Monday morning, with looming grey, hurricane-season clouds forming behind us, I got it.
