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Finding Fire: new book explores cooking at its most elemental
Chef and writer Lennox Hastie explores how burning wood can be used as a form of seasoning
What is the latest trend in international haute cuisine? A few years back it was modernism, using scientific techniques to create new tastes or imitate existing ones. After that, New Nordic was the flavour of the decade – an obsession with local or foraged ingredients.
Now, fire cuisine seems to be the most likely candidate for the future – cooking only with flame or charcoal, with no gas or electricity in the kitchen. The most renowned exemplars of these trends are modernist Ferran Adrià at El Bulli; New Nordic pioneer René Redzepi at Noma and flame maestro Victor Arguinzoniz at Etxebarri.
Lennox Hastie, whose new book Finding Fire, published this month, spent five years as sous chef at Etxebarri in the Basque Country before opening Firedoor, his restaurant in Sydney. If you believe the clichés, the favourite form of cooking in Australia is barbecue, especially shrimps or “prawns on the barbie”.
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However, this is a far cry from Hastie’s cooking techniques, which utilises a vast array of different woods with produce as varied as elvers (baby eels) and caviar.
Hastie, now in his late thirties, spent time at Raymond Blanc’s Manoir a Quat Saisons before working for the Sultan of Oman as a private chef plus in two three-star Michelin restaurants in France and Spain. It was only when he ended up at Etxebarri that he found his true passion, which was the result of the restrictiveness of the culinary techniques: “I think anything you do within a strict framework pushes your limits,” Hastie says. “That was why my time in Spain was so creative – you are restricted to these specific ingredients and the way you can cook them and when you do that, you are at your most creative – you have to be.”
My dinner at Firedoor was one of the most stimulating meals I have had in recent times – the subtlety of the cooking beggared belief that it was done purely with flame and charcoal. The squid and oysters were imbued with a delicate smokey flavour as well as the more “conventional” produce, such as 170-day aged beef.
The equipment in his restaurant looks deceptively simple - two wood fired ovens, three grills and a wood-burning hearth. However, the effort to get things right took nearly two years before he opened Firedoor. Every millimetre difference in the width of the grill has an impact, as does the temperature of the various woods he burns.
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“I don’t like viewing barbecue or flame as a heat form… instead, I look at wood as a form of seasoning as it is an intrinsic ingredient. We used different types of oak in Spain but there are a lot of Australian woods you cannot use because they burn up to 400C hotter because of the resin, so I had to rebuild my ovens to cope with it.
“Ironbark works well and I love fruit woods such as apple and I use old grape vines for my aged beef.”
Every day they set aside up to seven different types of wood before deciding on three or four which are most relevant for whatever the produce happens to be.
The book goes into exhaustive detail about the six stages of fire (ignition, smoke, flame, embers, ash and cinders) as well as recipes for six varieties of food (vegetables, seafood, meat, fruit, dairy and wheat).
Hastie is a perfectionist and admits that he still has a great deal to learn.
“Even after 10 years or so, I feel I am just beginning… there is so much more to know and I learn new things every day. The same types of wood can be subtly different, depending on where they come from - it is all trial and error.
“It is not just the wood and the temperature that affects the food - every variant has an impact, even with the water used to cook different vegetables.
“In Spain, we kept our elvers in a mountain stream under a waterfall and drowned them in tobacco-infused water. It all sounds crazy, but everything you do has an impact on what turns up on the plate.”
