This kind of cooking has chefs fired up

On any given evening, Russell Moore can be found playing with fire.

At his Camino restaurant in Oakland, the chef ping-pongs between a central fireplace and the kitchen's wood-fired oven, tending to smoldering logs and juggling earthenware cazuelas. His entire concept and menu, in fact, is built around live fire cooking.

There's certainly nothing new about this primitive form of preparing food. Yet local chefs have a renewed passion for wood-fired ovens. A central part of kitchens in places such as Coco500 and Nopa in San Francisco, Poggio in Sausalito and Rosso in Santa Rosa, these domed, open ovens are used for far more than pizzas or hearth-baked breads. And above all, chefs say, they make cooking fun.

"It's very active," says Moore, explaining that putting something into the wood oven is not at all like throwing it into a closed oven, timing it and pulling it out. "The great thing is that it's basically built at waist level, so it's really visual. You can look right in to see exactly what's happening."

By simply moving or changing a log, Moore says he's able to change the temperature quickly or alter the pockets of intense heat and precisely control the cooking.

"You can't do that in a regular oven," Moore says. "Here, you can cook meat, a vegetable side dish and fish in the same oven, using the same heat source." On weekend mornings, he even uses the wood oven for French toast.

What he doesn't cook in the oven is pizza. That's because pizza and other foods can't automatically coexist in the oven. Yet the number of restaurants using the ovens for items like seafood, poultry, vegetable gratins and shelling beans is on the rise.

"There are two different approaches to the wood-burning ovens," says Coco500 chef/owner Loretta Keller. One, she says, is to do strictly pizza; hard-core Neapolitan-style pizzaiolos like Bruce Hill at Pizzeria Picco in Larkspur use the ovens for little else.

"If you're going to do that," explains Keller, "you have to run your oven at 900 degrees. You can cook a pizza in two minutes that way."

Keller says that she wanted to use her oven to be more versatile, so she keeps her 6-foot oven in the 600 degree range. That allows her to turn out a whole roasted fish, chicken with panzanella, and a crusted salt cod brandade - plus a host of other appetizers.

Temperature is a key factor for John Franchetti as well, who attempts to use the oven at his Rosso Pizzeria & Bar in Santa Rosa for both pizza and other dishes, though he admits it takes finessing.

"We use it both for the beginning heat and the ending heat," says the chef, who explains that the temperature will peak for the pizzas during the lunch and dinner rush, but cools down in between for everything else, such as like meatballs, braised shortribs, and agrodolce peppers with rosemary sweet and sour sauce.

Franchetti says he also prefers the oven because it imparts a wood essence to the food - he uses either almond or walnut - that you won't find in a regular oven. But most chefs say that it's more about technique than flavor.

"People have this misconception that wood ovens are very smoky," says Moore. "They're not. The smoke hovers above the food, it doesn't go into the food."

Due to the shape of the oven and the way the wood burns, it generates the sort of high heat that's hard to re-create elsewhere.

Because of that, says Keller, "You can finish dishes and introduce layers that would be much more difficult in a conventional oven or on the stove. You have an oven where you can bake or roast, and a salamander where you can brown. You have everything at once."

Plus, you get to play with fire.

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E-mail Amanda Gold at agold@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle