Grant Crilly is the Executive Director and cofounder of ChefSteps. Grant is a classically trained chef and, prior to ChefSteps, he worked on the award-winning cookbook series Modernist Cuisine and cooked at various restaurants, including L’Astrance in Paris, Busaba in Mumbai, and Mistral Kitchen in Seattle.

Grant Crilly

Move over, pizza. There’s <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/high-performance-wood-fired-brick-oven-frenzy">more than one thing</a> you can cook in your high-performance <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/diy-wood-fired-neapolitan-pizza-oven-for-less-than-50">backyard brick oven</a>, including a truly epic <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/cuts/beef-tomahawk-steak">tomahawk steak</a>. The DIY brick oven is very efficient, but cooking with it is not an exact science. It’s like a hotrod, and it takes a renegade to drive it. Once you get comfortable controlling the fire to create different oven “functions,” from <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/crispy-crusty-wood-fire-queso-fundido">broiling</a> to <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/wood-fire-crusty-rosemary-focaccia">baking</a> to low-and-slow <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/wood-fired-juicy-chewy-tomato-jam">braising</a>, the outdoor cooking world is truly your oyster—or <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/butter-baked-wood-fire-lobster-dungeness-crab">lobster</a>. A <a href="https://snakeriverfarms.pxf.io/QyNdnP">tomahawk steak</a> is, hands down, one of the best steak cuts that you can buy. It will generously feed at least two people, if not more. But it’s not cheap and deserves to be cooked with care. We don’t recommend attempting this without an instant-read or probe thermometer. Clever cooks, start your hotrod oven engines. We’ve got some cooking to do.

Wood-Fired Tomahawk Steak