Cooking with FIRE! My first experience with my new Wood Fired OvenA couple of days after we received our Model B oven I decided to cook pork tenderloin and a couple of different types of steaks (New York Strip and Porterhouse). I put some rolled up newspaper and some cedar kindling in the firebox. I lit the paper and had a decent little fire going in about two minutes. I was anxious to get it up to temperature so I placed more newspaper and more kindling on the fire. This was a mistake. Adding too much paper can create too much ash in the cooking chamber. I ended up using a bellow to blow the ash out of the cooking chamber before cooking. Once I had the ash out of the chamber and had my oak logs burning nicely the oven was at about 600 degrees and ready for a steak. I put a one inch thick New York Strip on the upper grate and in about 2-3 minutes flipped it. About another 1-2 minutes and it was about medium rare. I sliced it up and a few of us tried it and it was probably the juiciest steak I have ever eaten! Next we put the pork tenderloin on the stone at the bottom of the cooking chamber. Rolled it around a little bit and in about 9-10 minutes it was ready to eat. The juices were seared in the tenderloin and there was no mistaking it had been cooked with a wood fire and not on a grill or in a conventional oven. Last we decided to see how fast we could cook the porterhouse. I placed it on the top grate and it was only a couple of minutes before it was cooked. In fact we ended up slightly over cooking it due to the wood fired oven being extremely hot at this point (about 900 degrees). It was still juicy and tasted excellent.
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