Remember the 70's? If you do, then you will probably recall the Romatof pots or clay ovens that were all the rage back then. Even if you had one, I doubt that it will have survived years of yard sales and basement cleanings and has long since gone the way of all old kitchen knickknacks. Not to worry though, clays are back, big time, and they are brighter, better and fit right in with our low fat diets and don't look out of place in our design conscious world.

We decided to take a look at a new line of clays from Chef Walter and see if they live up to the hype.

A brief history lesson might help here. Clay cooking is one of the earliest forms of container cooking known to man. Terracotta (literally cooked earth) was an abundant natural material for making glazed and unglazed cooking pots in the pre-industrial era. Unglazed clays have the capacity to speed cooking and enhance flavors. They are soaked in water before being used for cooking and create natural heat transfer via the steam.

The health benefits of this form of cooking come from the need for very little oil, there is no frying involved and much of the flavor comes from the speed of cooking rather than added fats. They act as a superheated steam bath and help to rapidly cook dishes and maintain flavors. Exposed food takes on a browned crusty appearance, while the main part of the dish cooks fully and is moist and succulent.

Glazed clays on the other hand are similar to Corning glass or other non metallic dishes and as far as I can tell have no real advantages other than a rustic appearance.

Chef Walter's new line addresses the cosmetic aspects of unglazed dishes, which tend to look less attractive with use as they stain badly. Walter's clays are “part glazed”. This means that the upper surface inside and out are glazed in one of a number of attractive colored glazes, leaving the base and inner parts of the pot unglazed. This gives you the best of both worlds, you get the unglazed steam and flavor enhancement effects and the pots look the part in any modern kitchen.

Walter's pots are attractive and have a nice solid feel about them. Available in three sizes, they really do have a strong visual impact, as you can see from the pictures. They appear to be of superior quality and are a lot tougher than they appear (actually they seem to bounce pretty well when dropped).

We tested a pre-production large clay and cooked one of the recipes included with the retail product. These recipes included soups, pasta and stews. You can definitely see this kind of food working well as mid-week family fare, given that preparation times are fairly short and the ingredients are simple. That's not to say that the you can't cook more complex and subtle dishes using the clays, especially as they make very attractive serving dishes.

We chose to cook “Farfalle Pasticciatte Nel Coccia”, which is a rustic chicken and bow tie pasta dish. The recipe we included here is a slightly modified version of the original. We found that even though the cooking temperature was high (400 degrees) that the chicken took slightly longer to cook than indicated and the final dish required a little more liquid than indicated to avoid being over dry. The recipe on the next page reflects these changes.

The food was excellent. We accompanied the dish with a green salad, fresh ciabatta bread and a selection of wines. You can read our tasting notes on the following pages.

Ultimately the value of these products lies in the fact that most of us want to cook healthy, tasty food as quickly as possible. These dishes should inspire you to try some recipes that are sure to be noticeably more flavorful than those plain casserole dishes produce.

We give these dishes a thumbs up. They are attractive and practical. The recipes get you started and you can see how you could cook many of your favorites in this manner. Overall we like cooking with them a lot, especially the way flavors were enhanced and look forward to adding both sizes to our kitchen, that is if we can agree on the choice of color!

The next section contains a recipe and details of our testing, followed by wine pairings.