Cookbooks & Recipes

We've cooked a lot more than bread in the bread oven.
The following are cookbooks and their recipes that have worked well for us.

La Tivola Italiana by Tom Maresca and Diane Darrow

Pizza Dough

Baking with the St. Paul Bread Club
Pane di Como
Summit Beer Brown-Again Bread
Honey Whole Grain Bread
Whole Wheat Bread
Finnish Cardamom Braided Bread

Roasting, a simple art by Barbara Kafka

Sea Bass with Fennel

Simple Roast Turkey

Simplest Roast Chicken

Pork Tenderloin

Joy of Cooking

Chicken breasts in Becker chicken marinade

French Bread
Pumpkin Pie (using a pumpkin baked whole in the bread oven)

Caroline Conran's Under the Sun: French Country Cooking
Tomato, Onion and Potato Gratin with Thyme and Juniper

The Cook's Encyclopedia of Four-Ingredient Cooking

Focaccia

We've also cooked a pumpkin (whole); lots of different variations of vegetables in olive oil and herbs; pea soup; beef burgandy. It's all fun; all delicious. Haven't burned anything yet!

Links:

St. Paul Bread Club

http://spbc.info/

Barbara Kafka

http://www.bkafka.com/

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving. What a wonderful word; what a wonderful day. We have so much to be thankful for - all the blessings that God gives us out of his abundant love: our home, our family, the dignity of meaningful work, our glorious earth.

We cooked two turkeys (9 and 10 lbs) in the bread oven instead of one large bird. It was a brilliant idea - 4 turkey legs to chomp on instead of two! We were hosting nine people for our feast and a larger bird wouldn't fit in the 9" tall door. We had cooked in the oven last weekend (Friday: roast pork tenderloin; Saturday: 2 batches of bread- french baguette, Summit Beer Brown-again bread; Sunday: roasted sea bass with fennel) Most of our roasting is inspired by a book from Barbara Kafka. She is my roasting guru. The roasting method is simple and obviously fool-proof: 500 degrees and an hour for a whole roast chicken. Our turkeys took 1- 1/2 hours at 500 degrees.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we fired up the oven to over 400 degrees. That fire burned for about 5 hours. The next morning, we fired it up again before church and by 1:30 it was at 540 degrees. When we started the fire the day before, the temperature was just under 100 degrees. That was all residual heat from three days prior. The weather has been rather warm for a Minnesota November, with temps in the 20s and 30s at night, but we were still awed by the level of heat our oven maintains for days!

Larry put the birds in at 2:00 for a 4:00 dinner time. They were in separate roasting pans - uncovered. And, yes, they did have stuffing in them, despite all the health warnings. In the indoors woodstove, we had a pot of Indian pudding bubbling away for 4 hours. We tried to cook two pumpkin pies in the bread oven first thing Thursday morning, but transferred them to the indoors gas oven when it appeared that the crust was melting, not baking! (the temperature was too low - before we lit a new fire Thursday morning, the oven was at 300 degrees - too cool for pies)

Alas, we have no pictures of our turkeys - you can imagine how hectic it was in the final moments before we gathered at table - two turkeys to carve, the potatoes to mash, the gravy to make (and defend!), drinks to be refilled, never mind the green beans, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry relish and chutney, whew! Elizabeth, Madeleine and Chad were here as was my mom (the cement worker - see first post); my sister, Phyllis and her boyfriend Ed, his lovely daughter, Ann. One person missing was our dear friend Bernard who is with his family again in Kenya. We miss you! After dinner we played games; Boggle and Taboo (love that buzzer!). Friends Letha, Scott and Emily stopped by to play games and sample some raspberry-infused wine from St. Croix vineyards. Thank God for 20-somethings with their amazing energy level! The 50-somethings were beat! And full and happy. And thankful.

Links: 

St. Croix Vineyards

Sourdough and focaccia on a Sunday night

On Sunday, we attached roofing felt and metal lathe on three sides and the roof to prepare for attaching the slate, stone and stucco to finish the outer oven cladding. So far, it has taken us two months - since Labor Day - to get to this point. Larry says this is the funnest thing he's ever built. I'm glad we get to build another oven at our property up north.

After working on the oven for a while, I was half tempted to NOT start a fire to prepare for baking bread (late in day, getting dark, blah, blah, blah). And then friend and neighbor, Sue, stopped over. She has just made the first two loaves from some new sourdough starter and wanted to know if our oven was going. So of course we started it up and told her it would be 2 hours to bake time.

I whipped up some focaccia dough (recipe from Cook's 4-Ingredient cookbook), but before we cooked the bread, we cooked some chicken breasts. They were FABULOUS! The oven was at about 500 degrees F, so I marinated them for less than an hour in Chicken Becker marinade from "The Joy of Cooking." I placed them (with some olive oil) in a large iron roasting pan and slid it in with the fire going and the door off. They sizzled and smelled wonderful and they were cooked in about 7 minutes. A simple salad and some whole wheat bread that I had made a couple days before completed the meal. After dinner, we cooked Sue's soudough (shown). It turned out great - maybe a shade too done.

Next day, the stove was at 315 dome and 285 sole, so we put a pork roast in for the day and went to work. The fire had been out for about 12 hours. The whole process (from splitting wood to eating) is SO much fun! It really makes me spend WAY more time outside than I usually do this time of year. And so I am a happier camper!