The Yorkshireman whose heart is in Italy and the ovens he's invented

He speaks fluent Italian and considers himself a man of Italy and Yorkshire.

“I’m Italian because my blood’s Italian, but I am very passionate about Yorkshire,” says Joe, 50.

He used to have a corporate job and spent 180 days a year travelling. Ask him how he went from that to manufacturing clay ovens, and he will blame his wife.

“You always blame your partner, don’t you?” he says

One year his wife, Faye, bought him a huge wood-fired oven from Italy in a loving nod to his passion for food and wine. That mighty oven was made of clay and weighed 300 kilos.

It had to be craned into the garden and, once cured and ready to use, took four hours to reach temperature whenever Joe wanted to cook, burning around 20 kilos of wood.

“And there’s only three of us. We used it four times and the following year when I went to use it again, the whole thing had cracked in half.”

He rang the manufacturers, who said the oven needed to be used every week, not ideal in Yorkshire. Joe thought, “I’ll need a mortgage and a forest just to keep that thing going.”

Out of frustration, he set about designing his own.

“It took four years in my shed, building these ovens. They were loads of failures.”

After going through 40 prototypes, he found what he wanted and sold his first oven in January 2017.

“It was a massive moment,” he says. “I thought this was going to be a hobby, me making something for me which no-one will ever want.”

While metal pizza ovens are widely available, Joe makes wood-fired clay ovens suitable for cooking pizzas and most other food too.

Joe wanted an oven that would withstand the UK climate. That’s why there is a fibreglass shell on the outside.

“It can be used all year round and we’ve gone to the Nordics when it’s minus 20 degrees in the winter. And they still work fine.”

The frontage is made of marine stainless steel, and inside sits that piece of volcanic stone from Italy. As the oven is portable, and is not hot underneath, it can be placed on a table outside.

Mostly what famished Joe wanted was an oven that heated up quickly.

“Because I am time hungry, I don’t have four hours to light something. The oven only takes 25 minutes to get to 500 degrees. What we’ve done is reinvent an old way of cooking. But we’ve modernised it. The oven doesn’t have a chimney. What happens is, as the clay warms up, it starts burning off oxygen and heating up all the clay. One piece of wood lasts 25 minutes, so it’s super eco-friendly.”

The ovens can be bought and used by anyone, so long as they have £1,395 to spare.

“They’re not the cheapest, but they will last you forever,” Joe says, adding that his ovens are also in eight restaurants. “And none of them are using it for pizza.”

Steak works a treat, he says – “You can cook a chateaubriand in under eight minutes.”

Swinton Estate in North Yorkshire uses a professional version of Joe’s oven, double the size and three times the capacity, at its wood-fired cookery school twice a month, as well as in the restaurant.

Marc Williams, the resident chef at the cookery school, says: “I have always had a huge passion for live-fire cooking. I love the flavours you can evoke from smoke, and you can’t fake flavour.”

Once you get the hang of wood-fired cooking, anything is possible, according to Joe. If you add a door, you can hot smoke food at 600 degrees.

A black iron dish is heated for two or three minutes to match the heat of the base. “As soon as you put meat or fish or veg on to this, it seals it automatically. The flame cooks from the top, so it’s cooking from within its own flavours, You don’t lose any of the fats or any of the oils. This tenderises it and preserves the nutrients, but you’re cooking at high speeds and that’s why restaurants love it.”

You can use the oven as a tandoori to make naan bread, and should you wish, you could bang out 40 pizzas in an hour.

The oven is igloo-shaped, has a small entrance designed for air flow, and only emits smoke when lit. Once the flame has gone out, heat is retained for two-and-a-half hours.

“You can slow cook stew, pulled pork, lasagne,” says Joe. “Then after an hour of cooling down, it’s the right temperature to bake bread.”

Joe is keen on sustainability. His company recycles everything it can, uses electric vehicles, and sources most materials locally. Each oven takes three weeks to make and is “made of love”.

“Every single oven has got a difference, it’s never the same,” Joe says. “Every frontage is hand-welded, all the clay is naturally dried over about five days. The fibre glass alone takes about five days. It’s a labour-intensive process but it’s a real clay-fired oven.”

As Joe sits in his office, talking ten to the hot dozen, a whiteboard behind him lists the countries he supplies.

“Twenty-two countries, hot and cold,” he says.

Of all the export destinations, from Kuwait to the Maldives, Mauritius to Japan, Joe is most proud of one: Italy.

“In Italy they traditionally all have these big wood-fired ovens, but no-one has a small one like ours. If it’s good enough for the Italians, it’s good enough for everyone.”

Joe and Faye used to sell food from a horsebox at festivals and events. The pandemic killed that side of their business, although the ovens and the pizza dough they sell flourished during lockdown.

Sometimes he and Faye take a pizza oven into Leeds to feed homeless people, with their ten-year-old daughter shaping and stretching the pizzas.

His hope is that cooking pizzas could help bring people back into society and raise their self-esteem. Although this idea is in its infancy, he hopes to create a non-profit organisation.

“This is my ambition. A social conscience has been brought up with me, I think. We donate about ten ovens a year to cancer charities. It’s about us giving back.”

He’d also like to put an oven in the back of an old Fiat 500 estate he owns and take it to Italy. But he wouldn’t be driving there. “I’d ship it out, that Fiat 500 can only do about 30mph.”

https://delivita.com/

https://www.swintonestate.com/cookeryschool/