Cooking with Fire: From Roasting on a Spit to Baking in a Tannur, Rediscovered Techniques and Recipes That Capture the Flavors of Wood-Fired Cooking

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If the flames are cooking your meat and there are scorch or grill marks on it, you’re doing it wrong. With your fire so prepared, you can now cook several delightfully simple dishes. Potatoes can be roasted in their skins. Simply poke a few vent holes through the skins (so the potatoes don’t explode!), dig some trenches in white-hot ashes, and bury them until done. The outer skins will likely be burned to a crisp, but the inner white flesh will be delectable with just a pinch of salt.

Follow our guide to getting crisp, fluffy baked potatoes, then try one of our new toppings for a filling supper The best way to keep your fire going is to make sure the flame has a way to draw air — oxygen is critical. If you build a fire in a deep hole, it won’t be able to breathe. Follow our step-by-step guide to butterflying a leg of lamb, prepare with Greek flavours and roast or BBQ Based in Mumbai, Sandhu is part of a new wave of Indian chefs bringing fresh eyes to ancient ways of cooking. She creates rustic dishes using equipment she’s designed and built herself, including an angeethi (firepit) and a tandoor, as well as other interpretations of traditional Indian stoves and ovens, all fuelled by fire or coal. “The earliest record of cooked food in history made use of an open fire, which drew me to start cooking on wood or charcoal,” says Sandhu. Having risen to prominence on Netflix’s The Final Table, where she was the only Indian participant, Sandhu currently runs her own catering business, Bliss Food Experiences, and has also appeared on MasterChef India as a guest judge. This winter, inspired by the great Argentinian chef Francis Mallmann’s ‘seven fires’ we are creating a clearing dedicated to the art of cooking over an open fire. The area will be covered allowing us to teach in all weathers and use a wider range of cooking with fire techniques. This exciting new resource will be up and running for all our 2021 courses.

How to cook over a wood fire

While so many of us pride ourselves in grilling a perfect steak, most of us are making many crucial mistakes in the process, according to chef Lennox Hastie, a man who definitely knows a thing or two about cooking with fire. New cookstoves aren’t always adopted so easily and enthusiastically, however. For a stove to be fully accepted by a household, both stove and fuel must be affordable, accessible, and easy to use—goals that aren’t easy to achieve simultaneously, as the Pérez family has found. And in places where the social status of women is still tightly tied to the quality of their cooking, woe to the stove whose output doesn’t measure up to local culinary standards. “When I started this work, I thought it was just a matter of choices and appliances,” says Radha Muthiah, the chief executive officer of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which was founded in 2010 and is hosted by the United Nations Foundation, with support from public and private funds. “But as you get into it, you realize there are so many different considerations.” Muthiah and other stove experts emphasize that there is no single ideal stove or ideal fuel, as every household, every community, and every culture has different needs and priorities: a stove designed for rural Guatemala may well be completely impractical in Nairobi.

Before moving to St Kew Inn, you cooked in various notable kitchens around North Cornwall. What is it about cooking in Cornwall that you enjoy so much?

Ren Behan is a well-known food writer and mum-of-two based in Hertfordshire in the UK. She grew up in a food-loving Polish household and now writes a popular family-friendly and seasonally-inspired blog at www.renbehan.com. Ren enjoys cooking with her two children, aged 6 and 4. You have a very light misting on an ingredient because what I often is a lot of barbecue books tell you to brush something with oil and people will add too much to an ingredient and then it’s engulfed in flames. One of the key factors in fireside cooking is the ‘Maillard reaction’, whereby the sugars and amino acids in the meat combine at temperature to create new compounds with a distinctive flavour; complex, savoury, and aromatic. Getting this right requires careful control, as take things too far and the meat begins to carbonise, or burn effectively. So watching the process is key. Meat should be turned or rotated regularly, to ensure that heat is not being applied to one part of the meat for too long.