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According to author Michael Pollan, cooking is what allowed humankind to evolve to where we are today. In his new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Pollan explains that when our ancestors learned to control fire and to cook with wood, we are able to evolve bigger brains and to form societies - tribes - that cooperate.
Why bigger brains? Cooked food is more nutritionally dense and less time is needed to eat, chew and process it. The apes that most resemble us have bigger jaws and guts. Digestion of raw food takes almost as much energy as locomotion. When we are resting, our brains consume 20% of our energy. And killing an animal in prehistoric times was not easily done by a single individual. Hunters cooperated to trap and kill their prey, and then shared the bounty - after roasting it, since our guts are not designed to process raw meat. Later, with the development of clay cookware, humankind learned to cook grains - which went along with farming and the development of more complex family and societal groups.
Three Tomatoes Trattoria and Nika, the newly renovated Burlington sister of Three Tomatoes Trattoria, feature wood fired ovens as the keystone of each restaurant. These ovens allow their chefs to create masterpieces of cooking not easily created in a gas oven. Why? Because the wood fired ovens can create much hotter temperatures -up to 900 degrees- and allowing the chefs to smoke, bake and roast foods in ways gas fired ovens could never do. And of course, wood ovens impart subtle flavor to the dishes.
According to Chef Dennis Viera of Nika, cooking in a wood oven is a learned skill. Temperature regulation is not as easy as turning a knob up or down. He has learned how and where to place pieces of kiln dried maple, beech and yellow birch to get his oven at just the right temperature. Not hot enough? Add wood. Too hot? Scatter the logs a bit, spread the coals. Want to smoke a chunk of restaurant-cured bacon? Close the front of the oven with a steel plate for 15 minutes or so, and an intense smoky flavor will penetrate the bacon.
When I accompanied co-owner Robert Meyers to Burlington for the July wine-pairing dinner at Nika, I got to watch chef Dennis work. The oven floor at 5pm was 650 degrees, which he declared was "Perfect". He chopped some mushrooms, sprinkled them with olive oil and coarse salt, and spread them out on a big baking tray which he placed in the oven. You can't walk away from an oven that hot, he explained, as he left the kitchen to check up on one of his helpers.
But Dennis was back soon, rotating the pan to evenly cook each piece of mushroom. In just 5 minutes they were done - perfectly, and ready to mix with truffles slices and wild harvested Vermont chanterelles for use in a pasta dish. Clearly Dennis has an intuitive grasp of how long each item needs to be in the oven. But he also has a laser gun thermometer that will read the temperature of the various surfaces in the oven. Like a traffic cop, he held up the laser to show me how it worked as he checked the temperature of a piece of meat that was sitting on a counter 10 feet away.
But cooking with wood requires wood that is of very low moisture content - not firewood cut and stacked and left to air-dry, especially on a wet summer like this. To learn more, Robert Meyers and I visited Clifford Lumber in Hinesburg, the source of Nika's wood. There we met Lynn Gardener, age 64, who has been running the Clifford Lumber Company for 42 years - since he was 22 years old.
The company was started in 1929 by his grandfather; his father had a heart attack while Lynn was in college and the family business was going to be sold - unless Lynn wanted to take over. So a year out of college, he bought the business.
Lynn studied business and accounting in college, and that knowledge has served him well. He has figured out how to keep evolving the business as times have changed. Once purely a lumber mill sawing logs into boards, the business now sells about 1,200 cords of firewood that is cut, split and delivered. Much of that -about two thirds - is kiln dried. Additionally, the business makes sturdy wooden boxes to supply apple orchards and such, and wraps small bundles of firewood for sale in markets and campgrounds.
In 1992 Lynn decided to start selling firewood, so he went to Maine to learn how successful firewood businesses there worked. He knew there was -or should be - a demand for kiln dried firewood, and he wanted a part of that market. Once people use kiln dried wood, he told me, they rarely want to go back to green wood. It not only catches fire more easily, it burns hotter. It costs more, but is a much better product.
Robert Meyers and I toured the operation on a muddy day after a week of rainy weather. Pretty much everything is mechanized now, with specialty machines for cutting and splitting the wood, loading it onto trucks or filling bins with wood to go in the kilns. People want clean firewood, so the machine that loads it jiggles it hard to knock off the dirt, which I found ingenious. When Lynn bought the business, there were 23 employees and now -because of mechanization - they do the work with just six.
The firewood kilns are made from used shipping containers, the kind that go on trains or freighters. The kilns are filled with bins made of steel rod, each holding half a cord of firewood (a cord is 4 ft by 4 ft by 8 ft). The exterior of the containers are insulated, and each has a firebox to provide the heat. The fuel is just scraps of wood from the lumber business - boards that are not saleable. It takes about a week in the kiln and 1.5 to 2 cords of scrap lumber to dry a batch of firewood, which is 8 cords. They maintain a temperature of 165 to 185 degrees at all times, and have a vent fan to great rid of the moisture. There are 3 kilns that produce 24 cords a week.
Lynn Gardener is willing and able to do custom jobs to make, for example, a replacement post for a barn that is an odd size, say 12 feet long and 7 by 12 inches in cross section. If you are in the Burlington area and need some dry firewood, Clifford Lumber sells it at $350 a cord delivered. Lynn Gardener - or his son, Peter, who is an active partner in the business, can be reached at cliffordlumber@gmatv or 802-482-2325.
After reading Michael Pollan's book and watching (and tasting) the magic of Chef Dennis' wood-fired oven, I need to re-think my use of a gas grill. Maybe it's time to get back to my caveman roots, and start cooking with wood. I don't really need a brick oven. I bet I could just use that old Weber charcoal grill that's been languishing unused for years. Meanwhile, I know where I can go to get excellent meals prepared using wood. Yum!
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