People ask me all the time what makes wood-fire cooking different. The honest answer is that it's hard to explain without tasting it. But I'll try.
Most cooking happens on a flat surface with a knob. You turn it, heat comes out, and the temperature is more or less the same everywhere. It's consistent. Predictable. And that's exactly the problem.
A live fire is none of those things. The heat moves. It's hotter close to the coals, cooler at the edges, and the smoke drifts depending on the wind. You're not controlling the fire so much as working with it — reading where the heat is, adjusting distance and timing by feel. Every few minutes, the fire is doing something slightly different. That's what makes the food taste alive.
The wood matters more than you think
I cook almost exclusively with white oak. Here in Ojai, I source it locally — old oaks that have fallen or been cleared from properties in the valley. White oak burns hot and slow with a clean, steady smoke. It doesn't overpower the food with bitterness like mesquite can. Instead, it adds something subtle: a warmth in the background, almost sweet, that you taste in every bite but can't quite identify.
Different wood changes everything. Almond gives you a lighter, nuttier smoke. Fruit woods are delicate and fragrant. But white oak is my foundation because it lets the ingredients lead. A piece of Santa Barbara spot prawn cooked over white oak still tastes like prawn — just a more complete version of itself.
What I learned from Catalan cooking
I spent years at Tarsan I Jane in Seattle, a Catalan wood-fire restaurant where everything revolved around the grill. Not a grill in the American backyard sense — a proper Catalan setup where the fire is built to one side and the heat radiates across the cooking surface at different intensities. You have zones. You move things around. A leek might sit far from the coals for an hour, slowly charring and softening, while a piece of fish gets 90 seconds directly over the flame.
The Catalan approach isn't about searing everything with aggressive heat. It's about patience. Calçots — those big spring onions — get buried near the coals until the outer layers are completely black and the inside is sweet, almost custard-like. Whole fish gets propped on a rack next to the fire so the heat wraps around it gently. The technique is about letting fire do things that no oven or stovetop can replicate.
That training fundamentally changed how I think about heat. I stopped seeing fire as a tool and started seeing it as a collaborator.
What it actually does to food
Here's what fire does that nothing else can. The radiant heat from a wood fire creates a kind of crust on food that's different from what you get in a pan. It's not just a sear — it's a layered caramelization that goes deeper and tastes more complex. The Maillard reaction happens more gradually when you're working with live coals, and the result is a depth of flavor that registered even before you think about the smoke.
Then there's the smoke itself, which is really just vaporized wood sugars and compounds settling onto the surface of whatever you're cooking. With white oak, that means a clean, round smokiness. On a piece of ember-grilled sourdough bread, it transforms something already good into something you can't stop eating. On a wood-fired duck breast, it balances the richness of the fat with a subtle earthiness.
And there's something else that doesn't get talked about enough: the inconsistency is the point. When you cook a piece of branzino over a live fire, the skin where it was closest to the coals is deeply crisp and almost caramelized. The flesh near the spine, farther from the heat, is just barely set and silky. That variation in a single piece of fish is what makes it interesting. Every bite is a little different.
Why it matters for a private dinner
When I cook at someone's home, the fire is usually going hours before the first course. The smell of burning oak fills the yard. Guests arrive, there's something already cooking, and before anyone sits down they've already been pulled into the experience. That's not something you can replicate with a sheet pan in a preheated oven.
Every menu I build is structured around the fire. The bread goes on first — sourdough proofed that morning, baked directly on the coals. Small bites and grilled vegetables happen while the fire is at its hottest. The main course times with the coals settling into that perfect zone of steady, radiating heat. And dessert — smoked milk ice cream, charred stone fruit — gets its character from the last embers of the night.
The fire isn't a gimmick. It's the organizing principle for the entire meal. The way I work, every course is built around what the fire is doing at that moment.
If you've eaten food cooked over a properly managed live fire, you already know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, I think the simplest way to describe it is this: the food tastes more like itself. The prawn is more prawn. The bread is more bread. The fire doesn't add a costume — it strips everything down and turns up the volume on what was already there.
That's what wood-fire cooking actually tastes like.