Product test: wood-fired oven by the Garden Oven Company

We put a wood-fired garden oven through its paces. Smokin'!

Wood-fired ovens are something I’ve been fascinated by for a while. So I jumped at the chance to test one out for myself courtesy of the Garden Oven Company.

Sitting at the lower end of the price spectrum, the Garden Oven Company’s Model 1 (RRP £599) is a fairly compact beast with space underneath for storing wood and is easy to assemble by laying the fire bricks throughout. You can cook on the bricks or add a grill rack as you wish.

The oven was created by company founder Richard ‘Jay’ Larson, an engineer by trade who was impressed by an oven a friend had imported from France but with a design he felt he could improve on.

Interestingly, all of the parts for the oven are made in the UK, even the weatherproof cover. Jay and his wife Juliet’s experimentation over several years has also led to a cookery book.

But how did the oven actually work when put through its paces?

Pizza of the action

My first test was to make the dish that most people probably invest in a wood-fired oven to make: pizza. Eight adults and 12 kids gathered together to customise their pizzas with their own choice of toppings while I attempted to get the oven going.

Jay had recommended starting a small fire on one side of the oven and gradually letting it build. I’d already experimented with this a few times without getting beyond 350°C (the recommended temperature for wood-fired pizzas is a flaming 400°C).

I managed to get the temperature dial moving quite quickly and had got to 300°C quite quickly but it took a good 30-40 minutes to push it further towards the 350°C mark. A test pizza was brought out and this cooked fine in around three minutes so I figured it was better to press on with 20 hungry stomachs (not least mine) to feed.

So the pizzas were duly brought out one by one, popped on a pizza peel and dispatched into the oven. Speed is of the essence here to prevent the oven from cooling down too much when you open the door to put them in and take them out.

The first pizza was a touch on the crispier side but once I got into my stride I was pulling them out within a couple of minutes complete with gooey cheese and that wonderful wood-smoked finish.

Most tummies were satisfied, with the exception of a couple of the younger children who found the wood-smoked taste a tad too intense. But overall it was a success.

Pulled pork

The following weekend I tried my hand at smoking, which can be achieved by closing the vent on the chimney, thereby starving the fire of air and leading it to smoke.

I bought a hand (part of the upper foreleg) of pork from a local farm shop with the plan being to rub it with a homemade concoction, smoke it and then slow cook it.

The smoking process required quite a bit of attention as it’s a fine line between letting the fire smoke and putting it out altogether. But once I got the hand of it there were billowing clouds encasing the pork.

I give it a couple of hours then stoked the fire up to give a temperature of around 150°C for the slow roasting. Again, this requires a bit more fiddling to keep to temperature and you can’t walk away and forget about it for too long. But you could smoke your dish in your wood-fired oven and then bung it into a conventional oven if you want to go and do other things.

After around four and a half hours the pork was falling off and could be put into buns. It had a good mellow wood-fired taste that was just on the right side in terms of its intensity. So two cooking experiences at opposite ends of the spectrum and two good results. I was duly impressed.

Conclusion

Many people are looking for a wood-fired oven just to make pizza but they definitely offer much more, from smoked potatoes to slow-cooked puddings. If you want to experiment and see if one would make a good permanent addition to your cooking options then the Model 1 would definitely be a great oven to try, given it’s at the lower end of the price spectrum. It certainly fired up my cooking for two weekends.

Find out more at the Garden Oven Company website

Have you tried wood-fired cooking? Do you have any tips and tricks? Let us know in the Comments section below.

Images in article by John V. Willshire

You might also enjoy:

Slow cooked pulled pork recipe

Authentic Margherita pizza recipe

Wonderbag: a slow cooker with potential to make a real change

Gadget review: Vida halogen oven