My fascination with wood fired cookery started when my family and I moved to Nevada City California in 1995. Nevada City is located in the gold country foothills above Sacramento. We are at 2500 feet where an incredible mix of trees grows. The five acres we lived on had Oak, Ponderosa Pine, Madrona, Cedar, Douglas Fur and Manzanita growing on it. I remember cooking my first meal on a campfire style pit,dug into the ground, with a makeshift grill that stood on four threaded rods. We would sit on lawn chairs around the fire eating chicken and drinking wine. The aroma of chicken cooking over wood that first night is something I will never forget.
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This pit overlooked a seasonal creek on the property. Great pit, but we out grew it the same summer we built it. I learned a lot about cooking with wood on an open pit at that creek side pit. First and foremost, I discovered that people loved watching their food cook while sitting around a fire. This is where our ancestors held court. Where hunters where praised for feeding the tribe and stories where told by elders. The fire represented life it’s self. The next fire pit took four months to build in the winter-spring of 1998. We took the basic design of the creek side pit and expanded it. I had to bring in a backhoe to carve out the side of a little hill near the house. This pit was designed for entertaining, with extra seating room around the pit. I made a 12-foot long picnic table on a terrace above the pit that could seat 12. In the picture below, you can see a gray box on the side of the raised cooking area where I added a rotisserie motor. Now we could finally roast chicken on a spit over the fire. This rotisserie chicken became our trademark and we even developed a Fugi Apple BBQ sauce that we still make and can each year. Back then, I use to can maybe a dozen quarts of sauce a year. Today, I can four times that much to keep up with my family’s demands.  The hillside pit was where I found a new life style. I loved the feel of the grass under my bare feet.  In this picture you can see part of the picnic table. I built it with 3” x 10” ponderosa pine that was milled from the property. |
I now live a few miles from that property on a ½ acre. The very first thing we did upon moving in was build the third generation of fire pits. It had been 13 years since I had first built the creek side pit and had some different ideas on what we needed. I decided not to use the raised cooking area concept this time, keeping the cooking area the same height as the rest of the pit. The pit was built using a double wall construction method like you see on stonewalls. The cooking area is 36” wide by 18” deep, which is the size of an off the shelf grill. The ground does slope a little bit, so I positioned the cooking area at the low end, which helps make cooking a bit easier. By keeping it all the same height we now had tons of lay space to the left and right of the cooking surface.
In this picture you can see the wood form that I used to create a firebox for the cooking
Had I known then that I was going start this blog with Kelli, I would have taken a lot more pictures of the construction to show you. Below is a picture of the finished pit. The outside walls are 8 feet in diameter,the inside diameter is 6 feet. Making the pit round allows for 360 degree seating with a bench for the cook. The bench also double as lay space for cooking and serving. The double wall construction makes for a great place to sit or kick your feet up by the fire. I also included rotisserie with this pit.
Around the pit are Adirondack chairs that I made 15 years ago. I bought one chair
and used it as a template for the rest.
Before I start cooking, I like to build a large fire in the center of the pit. From there you can distribute some of the coals under the grill,while still leaving plenty of fire in the center for everyone to sit around.
