Fire power: Watsonville company designs wood fired ovens - and teaches customers to use them!

By Kathryn McKenzie Nichols, reprinted from The Monterey Herald Jan 20, 2010

On a cold winter’s day, there are few places nicer to be than in the test kitchen of Mugnaini Imports, the Watsonville-based company that makes wood-fired ovens. Warm and fragrant with delicious aromas, the kitchen is where restaurant chefs come to train and where classes are held for regular folks who love to cook. Learning to use a wood-fired oven isn’t hard, but involves a whole different set of skills than most of us possess.

“Commercial chefs use this kitchen like a laboratory,” said company president Andrea Mugnaini, and on this particular day, Executive Chef Tony Baker from Monterey’s Montrio Bistro is experimenting with dishes such as toad-in-the hole and roasted artichokes with brie. Montrio recently had one of the Mugnaini ovens installed, so Baker is testing recipes and having fun with the new appliance.

Most of us associate wood-fired ovens with making pizza, but as Mugnaini points out, they can be used for a great many things — roasting meats, baking bread, for soups and stews, and even making desserts. Although people are now rediscovering wood-fired cooking, it’s a technique as old as time. Europeans have cooked in these ovens for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, although in times past the ovens were large, built primarily outdoors, and shared by an entire village for the daily tasks of bread-baking and roasting. But after modern indoor ovens came into vogue in the mid-20th century, these ovens were on the verge of becoming antiques.

And that’s where Andrea Mugnaini came in.
In the mid-1980s, Mugnaini (pronounced moon-YA-ini) traveled to Tuscany and reconnected with family there. While in Italy, she tried her hand at cooking in wood-fired ovens, and fell in love with them. The moist, high-heat environment created inside the ovens worked to the benefit of many dishes.

Mugnaini was determined to have one for her home, but couldn’t find one that was quite right, until she discovered the Valoriani oven made by a family-owned company in the Tuscan town of Reggello. These ovens (in Italian, forno a legna) were made for outdoor use and retained heat more efficiently than traditional types because of the refractory clay and the firebrick used in the oven’s cooking floor.

And that led to another idea: bringing the ovens to America.
“Everyone told me I was out of my mind,” said Mugnaini, whose company will celebrate its 20th anniversary next month with an free event in Watsonville that will include raffle prizes, selections from her upcoming cookbook, and wood-fired pizza. “Even the Valorianis discouraged me.” But she wheedled 10 ovens from them, brought them to the United States, got all the necessary permits and OKs, and eventually got exclusive North American rights to distribute the Valoriani oven.

Amazingly, Americans responded almost immediately to the oven. And Mugnaini has been busy ever since.
Mugnaini’s inspiration led to a rebirth of this culinary style. On the verge of dying out in Europe, it is now alive and growing once more as people worldwide rediscover the joys of this unique style of cooking. Although Mugnaini isn’t the only company supplying such ovens these days, Andrea Mugnaini said the quality of her wares is superior to her competitors. The company’s residential ovens start at $2,750 and go up to $9,500 (the largest factory-assembled model, the Prima 120, checks in at $10,950).

The Muganini company has installed ovens at restaurants throughout the United States, including Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse and the Sunset magazine outdoor test kitchen, and both indoors and outdoors at a wide variety of homes.
Chef Baker of Montrio said he likes the versatility of the wood-fired oven, and the fact that it will allow him to add some new items to the menu that he couldn’t offer before. It also offers quick and tasty roasting of items such as the aforementioned artichoke dish, which is pre-cooked but finished in the oven.

These days, Mugnaini said, her company imports the refractory clay and firebrick ovens from Italy and builds “surrounds” for them at their facility near Watsonville Airport. There are styles for homes and styles for restaurants; there are even mobile wood-fired ovens in trailers for use by caterers. From there, the ovens are shipped far and wide, throughout the United States as well as Canada and Mexico.

But that’s not the end of the relationship with the customer — in fact, it’s just the beginning.
What Mugnaini discovered early on was that education was needed in order for Americans to get the most out of their ovens. And so customer service, as well as ongoing classes, became an integral part of the company. “I really get to know my clients,” said Mugnaini. “It’s not just like selling an appliance. We develop a nice relationship with our clients.”

You can also take classes even if you don’t own an oven — there are some offered to the public on a regular basis, with a complete schedule available at the company’s Web site, www.mugnaini.com. Andrea Mugnaini teaches many of the classes, which are offered in Watsonville, as well as at her cooking facility in Healdsburg, and weeklong sessions in Tuscany. Private and commercial classes are also available. “It wasn’t originally my intent to teach, but it’s become my favorite thing to do,” she said.

Coming up in Healdsburg will be a three-day class on Cooking Wild Game Jan. 28-30, and a three-hour class on the basics of wood-fired cooking in Watsonville on Feb. 12.

What throws most cooks where these appliances are concerned is building a proper fire and keeping tabs on it — Mugnaini calls it “the basic core of all our programs.” The fire is built on one side of the oven floor and the heat transfers to the entire oven; dishes are cooked or baked alongside the fire. Students learn how to recognize visual cues, such as the height and color of the fire, in determining oven temperature. (Those who buy Mugnaini ovens also receive handheld infared temperature gauges, but Mugnaini insists that her students know how to tell temps the old-fashioned way.)

“It doesn’t work like a barbecue or a grill — it’s a whole different dynamic,” said Mugnaini.
But what these ovens do is create a sense of family and warmth in the home that an ordinary range can’t match. “It’s a very sensuous, very human way of cooking,” she said. “It enters your life. There’s something about the open hearth lifestyle. People will stand and socialize in front of one — you don’t see people doing that in front of a gas oven. It brings people together.”