We got a chance to hang out with our long-time friend Chef Bruno Quercini of Pane e Vino.

Chef Bruno comes from a long line of chefs in Italy. He’s been cooking as long as he can remember and says he received his best culinary training from his mother– learning all her cooking secrets and family recipes by age 13. He’s made Pane e Vino a San Francisco favorite since it opened in 1991. Not only does he make the most perfect risotto (it literally melts with flavor in your mouth), he also makes an incredible pizza that he tops with his very own house-cured meats.

As you might imagine, the highest quality tools are a priority for Chef Bruno. For slicing his meats, he uses a fiery red vintage-style hand-cranked slicer. For his pizza, he uses a wood-burning MAM 505 whose refractory surface imparts his thin crust pies with an authentic Neapolitan-style browned crust in just 2 and 1/2 minutes!

In the 1980’s wood burning brick ovens were popular for cooking and finishing a lot of different dishes. Today we’re seeing a resurgence in the demand for wood burning ovens due to the increasingly popularity of that Neapolitan style, thin crust pizza! Some would now argue that it’s the best of the wood-burning, and the only way to do a thin crust pizza, is with the famous MAM brick pizza oven.

The MAM oven floor is constructed from cement Fondu La Farge, composed of 40% alumina, a mixture vibrated into refractory molds which can withstand heat up to 1350 degrees Celsius or 2462 degrees Fahrenheit. The MAM oven comes in 3 different sizes (30”, 39”, and 55” diameters). You can get it with wood or with gas.

A typical wood burning MAM will consume about 12 logs per day. If you prefer to use gas but still wish to impart a wood flavor to your food you can soak wood-chips in water and place them in a perforated stainless steel container and place them on the oven deck. Chow Restaurants in San Francisco, and El Caserio in the Silver Lake area in LA use wood-burning MAM ovens.