More experiments in wood-fired cooking

 Some more ponderings on how to cook in the wood-fired oven.

First things first. I'm so glad I invested in serious insulation in the oven dome. It really is incredibly efficient to cook, when the heat doesn't escape. A small wood pile will get the oven hot enough to flash cook a pizza or two, then slow cook a whole joint overnight from the trapped heat slowly cooling.

Here you can see that not very much wood has got the oven up to 300+C.
This is easily sufficient to cook a pizza in 5-10 minutes.

Cooking pizza seems to work best with the door open - the airflow gets the wood firing up. The parabolic form of the inner oven surface radiates the stored heat down onto the pizzas in parallel (well, more or less).

The oven cools down a bit when the door is open.

But that's OK - after cooking anything that need high heat - you can just pop a pork joint or some beef ribs in at bedtime and it will perfectly slow-cook, over 7 or 8 hours, while you slumber.

For example on such a night, this is the ambient oven temperature late at night - about 190C

In you go brisket joint, in stock with veg...

At 7am the next morning, the temperature had, very gradually, slowed to about 80C

And the meat internally has cooled to 56C after hours of slow cooking

After this sort of prolonged low heat cooking, the meat just falls apart ...
  

Some more examples

Short rib, before cooking - sitting in well seasoned stock...

Later on (like 8 hours of cooking), slavered in a sauce based on the remainder of the sauce

Fall-apart delicious...

A brisket joint after overnight cooking...

turned over with juice topped up a bit

Morning temperature after 8 or 9 hours cooking

More short ribs after a night of slow-cooking..

Ribs are super-tough unless you slow cook them. Then they are divine...

A pork shoulder joint, marinated for a couple of hours...

And after overnight cooking...

A different pork joint, deconstructed easily with forks...

and so on, and so on...