The Complete Kiwi Pizza Oven - Wood,
Fire, Food and Friends
Alan
Brown
Photography
by Todd Eyre
Hardback - Bateman - RRP: $49.99
Award-winning
chef lecturer Alan Brown celebrates the Kiwi love for cooking outdoors in this
comprehensive and sumptuous new book on pizza ovens
For most of his life, Alan Brown has been drawn to food
cooked in ovens fuelled by wood. ‘There is something about the honesty of
cooking by this method. No matter what technology allows us to do or how clever
we become, it can never provide as much satisfaction as that found working with
nature’s most basic fuel and heat source and with fresh ingredients — just as
it has for thousands of years.’
Alan built his own pizza oven more
than five years ago and has noticed an ‘explosion’ in oven ownership in recent
years. As an experienced chef and chef lecturer, he has noticed that people can
be inhibited about fulfilling their oven-owning desires, not so much because of
a shortage of information on how to get one, but more due to a lack of
knowledge and confidence about what to do with it once they have one.
The Complete Kiwi Pizza Oven is a practical, user-friendly guide
offering highly sought-after and comprehensive New Zealand-specific information
to get the most out of your oven. Included are sections on how to buy or build
an oven, useful oven equipment, what wood to use, and how to fire the oven
effectively.
Over 70 recipes photographed in sumptuous
colour demonstrate the ease and versatility of using the oven at different temperatures.
The recipes
cover pizzas, seafood, succulent joints of meat (overnight lamb shoulder, eye
fillet of beef, butterflied chicken and lamb, pork shoulder, etc.), vegetables,
desserts, bread and brunch the next day.
Featured throughout this handsome book are
profiles of individuals from around the country who talk about their ovens,
offering tips and pointers, as well as descriptions of their
favourite things to cook.
About the author:
Alan Brown is a senior chef
lecturer at AUT University, where last year he was awarded the Vice
Chancellor’s Academic Excellence Award, as well as becoming the first New
Zealand recipient of the London City and Guilds’ International Medal for
Excellence in teaching culinary arts.
Alan
is also a national culinary judge and critic for New Zealand Lamb and Beef,
Monteith’s Beer and Wild Food Challenge, New Zealand venison (Cervena), Silver
Fern Farms, at
World Skills, Restaurant of the Year, Best Sausage, and Young Butchers
competitions, and for the New Zealand Food Writers Guild.
Alan’s
lifelong passion for all things culinary means his leisure activities often
centre around upskilling and ‘tinkering’, including making wine, cheese and
sausages, hot- and cold-smoking, baking sourdough bread, distilling, food
photography, gourmet travel in New Zealand and abroad, and, of course, cooking
in his wood-fired oven.
Facebook: Alan
Brown / Twitter: @WoodovenAl
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