Cooking with fire

IT MAY have been the smoky taste of the trout. Or the crispness of the pizza crust. Or the flame-roasted flavor of the flank steak. Whatever the reason, from the very first time Mary Karlin cooked over fire, she was hooked.

"Fire is very seductive. No matter what you are cooking, it imparts a unique flavor that you can't get any other way," Karlin explains. "When you cook with fire, the wood literally becomes an ingredient in your food."

Karlin, author of "Wood-fired Cooking" and the founder of Ramekins Culinary School in Sonoma, is so enamored of cooking with fire that she spends every spare moment doing Live Fire Boot Camps, workshops and private tutorials all over the country. This summer, she'll teach boot camps at her Live Fire Cooking Camp Culinary School in Arizona, and also at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, and at Ramekins in June.

Although Karlin started teaching classes in wood-fired cooking in 2000, she says interest is clearly growing, inspired in part by the introduction of The Big Green Egg, an efficient, somewhat portable wood-fired oven that doubles as a grill and a smoker.

"Before, the only way the home cook could get into wood-fired cooking was to build their own oven or invest $1,000 or more in a brick oven."

Although plenty of Karlin's students go home and use their gas or charcoal grills to make the recipes she shares in her classes, she's a bit of a stickler on the wood-fired issue.

"What I like about the wood-fired method is that it's totally different from gas," she says. A gas grill "is basically 'on demand' heat. With wood, you are entering into a process. It takes time and insists that you be more connected to it. You have to think about whether you want to use pecan or mesquite or something else. And after you've taken the time to build the fire, you want to make either a lot of food and share it or invite others to cook food too. It fosters community."

A study in patience

She says it can take as long as six hours for a brick or wood-fired oven to reach 500 degrees, but at that point, it can cook dish after dish, starting with breads that require the hottest heat, moving into roasted meats, then braises.

"Honestly, if I had my choice I'd cook this way all of the time," she says, adding that she now spends just as much time teaching people to cook with fire as she does running Ramekins.

The biggest change in outdoor cooking in recent years, she says, is the influx of women signing up for classes. Historically he-man territory, barbecuing is being embraced by women eager to master the skill of cooking with fire.

"I know a lot of women who take on the grill because they are tired of burned and dried-out food," says Julie Reinhardt, co-owner of Smokin' Pete's BBQ in Seattle and author of "She-Smoke: A Backyard Barbecue Book," ($16.95, Seal Press.) "The man may know how to use the grill, but the woman can bring that finesse."

Reinhardt, whose book is written especially for women, says her own mom is a "classic fire-phobe," and the men in her family didn't let her get close to the grill when she was young — she had three brothers and extra men always were crowding in on the grill action.

"I think a lot of women are kind of afraid of the grill because they aren't taught the safety issues and that sort of thing. When women use the grill, there's that fear of, 'Is it going to blow up on me?' But guys, they want things to blow up. That's the attraction they have to the grill."

Once women realize that the grill or the smoker is just another piece of kitchen equipment — that happens to be outside — they tend to bring to grilling and smoking the same expertise as they bring to the stove, she says.

Start simple

Although Reinhardt is a huge fan of smoking, which is time-intensive, she says beginners may want to start off with simple grilling and master that before moving to more complicated techniques.

"I still love my basic Weber. It's old and rickety, but it works. I can grill ribs on it, or I can bake a tart. It does everything I need."

Even Karlin is a fan of the Weber — so long as you at least line it with some brick to keep it hot for items that need to be cooked for longer periods.

"Part of cooking outdoors is learning to be responsible about heat," she says, adding that despite the smoke, cooking with fire can be economical and earth-friendly when used properly.

She says a lot of people who sign up for her class are novice barbecuers or grillers curious to know more about cooking with fire.

"The whole camp idea grew out of the cooking class. People wanted to know more than I could teach them in an hour," she says. At the school in Arizona, students are able to work with a range of wood-fired devices, which can help them to decide what kind they best prefer.

"When people get a taste of (cooking with fire), it changes them. It's just nothing like cooking inside on a stove with infrared burners."

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