The Complete Kiwi Pizza Oven

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