Three major reasons, Bill, why wood fires can b seriously better than flameless cooking like electrickery:
1) Many wood types burn cleanly without harm from chemicals as occurs with treated pine for example. Another very bad source of wood is painted or treated fences and another one 2 watch out for is internal timbers covered in glues or treated for pests like termites. I use timber saved from trees felled at our place and from branches falling from gums. I have about three years supply left coz a good wood fire oven (mine is clay) don't use a lot.
2) Most of the cooking is done on embers not raging flames there4 very little of the meat is burnt - just caramelised - yum!
3) I excavated under our house to enlarge my workshop and ended up with a driveway piled up with clay, found a book on building clay ovens, designed my own with a weatherproof fibro roof and four years later wonder how we ever survived without it. Anyway, what is the most excellent thing about clay is that it breathes while retaining cooking level heat 4 hours after the flames r gone. there4 u have the radiated heat of the embers, the constant steady heat of the clay and the evaporative heat of the food's juices swirling round in the oven. I still have my old standard wood fire rotisserie BBQ as well but it takes longer and uses much more wood.
I m cooking a pork roast as I type this and will let it go 4 3 hours and see what kind of cracking I can get.
So mr Biggles if u don't believe all this wood fire blarney then u r welcome to stop here on your way Ballarat (if you're going) and I would take gr8 pleasure in demonstrating the ancient art of wood fire cooking. And it would only costya a six-pack of Coopers if ya lucky.
