class=”caption”>String roasting quail at Copia

In my Copia hearth cooking demonstration I focused on methods that are simple and that require few, if any tools. All the methods I covered in the demonstration can be found in my book on hearth cooking, “The Magic of Fire.”

In this first photograph, you see quail being string-roasted. Three quail are hanging from each string. The string is tied to the quail’s ankles. The string in this instance is about six feet long. The quail turn on the strings and require little attention — only the occasional push. String roasting is explained in my book, and elsewhere on this web site. In my fireplace at home I hang small birds, like quail, from a stick that itself hangs from a hook in my dining room ceiling. As you can see from the picture, birds should hang right at the edge that separates the firebox from the hearth that extends into the room. In this illustration the birds are dripping onto a baguette that has been previously brushed with olive oil and toasted.

Hearth cooking demonstration

In the foreground I am demonstrating a tarte tatin. You can use any cookware when hearth cooking. If you don’t have specialized iron grills and tripods you can improvise with bricks and barbecue grills.

Hearth cooking demonstration

Baked fruit is one of the easiest of hearth desserts to make. It requires no recipe. The sweeter the fruit you start with — the more certain that the dessert will be glorious regardless of what you might add to the baking dish. In this case, I sprinkled the apples with a little sugar. Honey would also, of course, be appropriate. As I am writing this some time since I did the demonstration, I don’t recall whether I added any water to the apples before baking them, but I would say, as a rule, a little water to start the cooking process is probably always a good idea. This simple preparation is also extraordinary with speckle pears.

The simplest of all hearth cooking methods is roasting on embers. In this illustration I am roasted sweet red peppers. The peppers are roasted until they are black on all sides. A long-handled tongs is the best tool to use when handling peppers on the embers. The flavor is incredible — and the blackened skin peels right off once the peppers are cool. While it is hard to see in the illustration, if you look at the two peppers in the foreground, to the right of the right-most pepper is a pepper that is already largely charred. To the right of that pepper, against the wall, are the apples. We have improvised a Dutch oven by adding a pot-lid to the three-legged frying pan. The improvised the lid is piled with embers to make an oven. You don’t have to buy special equipment — improvisation is the key to hearth cooking.

You can see that the apples are fully cooked. A couple are slightly burned. In my own cooking aesthetic, it is just such chance spots of color that make a dish most wonderful As carmelization of sugars always increases flavor, it is also the fact that with hearth cooking I can always push the limits of a dish to create at least some caramelization that makes the hearth, for me, my favorite place to cook when I am trying to develop the best flavors I can.