Restaurant Sat Bains

The work we do at Restaurant Sat Bains with Rooms is very exacting. That includes the menus we create and produce here. The technical equipment that facilitates our dishes ranges from ultra-modern cooking kit to good old-fashioned preserving and fermenting in jars but everything we do is founded on one goal – flavour.

One of my favourite flavour profiles is the smoky, charred fullness of wood smoke. From aubergines to apples to slow-cooked meats, wood smoke just imparts that mellowness to certain dishes. It can’t be replicated by anything else.

I’ve known Jay Emery the founder of BWFO since 2009.

Our first joint exercise was to design and build a small wood-burning oven that would sit in our garden next to our then Development Kitchen.

We used it for vegetables, fruit and meat and it taught us just how flexible wood-fired cooking was for us.

The next step then was to somehow incorporate a larger one in our main restaurant kitchen, which was no easy task as space was so tight.

We also needed a radical solution to the problem of the extra heat in the cooking environment. By removing an existing window and mounting the belly of the oven outside the building, we managed to minimise the residual heat inside the kitchen.

Bushman also developed an ingenious method of removing all the ash and mess from the back of the oven, which helps keep our kitchen spotless and ash free.

Necessity is the mother of invention and Jay certainly delivered on both counts!

However, what our two Bushman ovens have delivered as far as our guests are concerned is just that more intense, ancient flavour to some of our menu ingredients and dishes and the feedback has been phenomenal. BWFO has brought an exciting new dimension to the restaurant menus.

In the following recipes using BWFO, I hope you find a whole new world of flavours and have a lot of fun making them too.