Welcome

Happy autumn! We hope you are enjoying these lovely fall days. Cooking in a wood-fired oven certainly offers the perfect excuse to stay outside just a little bit longer and savor the nice weather, even as the days are becoming shorter ... and cooler.

On that note, we've included two recipes to warm you up. First, a new recipe from Chef Bart Hosmer for fire-roasted clams with andouille sausage. This is his second recipe posted to the Community Cookbook, and we look forward to many more. (See his first post: classic dough and smoky tomato sauce.)

The other recipe below – also featuring sausage – is a just-added Pizza Quest instructional from Brad English: beer-sauteed lamb merguez sausage pizza.

Have some mouth-watering wood-fired recipes of your own to share? Enter our cookbook contest by October 24 for the chance to win a Vera Pizza Napoletana kit. Details below.

We hope you will stay in touch through the Forno Bravo Forum, YouTube (read more at the bottom), Facebook, Pinterest and our other online sites. Of course, you can always just call us at (800) 407-5119.

James

Peter's Corner: Beer-Sauteed Lamb Merguez Sausage Pizza

Peter Reinhart, our Pizza Quest host, baking instructor and baker extraordinaire, shares a new instructional from Brad English.

From Brad:

Lately, I've been playing with my wood-fired oven while it comes up to pizza temperature. There's a lot of usable heat to make side dishes, or in the case of making pizzas, some toppings. Once there is a good fire going, after 20-30 minutes, there is plenty of heat radiating out onto the hearth.

This is the perfect time to throw something together in a cast iron skillet, or in the case of peppers or chilies, you can just throw them onto the hearth stone at the foot of the fire and roast away.

This is one of the more interesting things about cooking with a wood-fired oven ... . Open fire cooking is more interactive. You can't just start the oven and set a timer. You have to work with the heat/fire, which is constantly changing. You also have to build your fire with a well-thought-out plan of how hot you want it, when you need it that hot, etc. As a home cook/food geek, with what I suppose is basically a cooking hobby, open fire cooking feels somehow more connective.

I've been sauteing my sausage this way for some time now. I've also been creating a variety of sausage "sauces" lately. I'll throw in some onions, garlic or other ingredients like fennel or jalapeños with my sausage and cook them, hopefully, until just before they are done, so they can finish on my pizza. The more I play with this sausage sauce idea, the more saucy it's gotten. The juice/sauce left over is a really great drizzle for the pizza, with lots of flavor!

Continue reading on Pizza Quest for Brad's instructional: Beer-Sauteed Lamb Merguez Sausage Pizza.