Dutch oven cooking

[olesma]

How many dutch oven cookers do we have out there?

I love trying to see what I can make in a dutch oven that will surprise people - I've made a bunch of stuff: Pinapple Upsidown Cake, Pot Roast, Gumbo, Lasagna...Lots of fun to make something unusual on the trail.

One of these days I want to pull out a dutch oven and a lobster on the trail and have a lobster bake. Wouldn't that just make everyone else crazy? Good times.

[jeremy77777]

I just love good dutch oven cooking. I'm a junkie for it. I must say that I haven't tried lobster, But I have done shrimp. Ah...yes, it did taste as good as it sounds. My personal favorite is brownie fudge cake. YUM YUM YUM!

[Nighthiker]

I have a dutch oven and a couple of the cast iron fry pans looking forward to using them again.

[montezumawell]

Dutch ovens have near mythical status in Utah. In fact, they are the official Utah State Cookware. The Utah legislature passed a law designating the dutch oven as Utah's official cooking pot. No kidding. You go to a public meeting up in Utah and, more often than not, there will be a "feed" for the attendees, naturally all cooked in a passle of dutch ovens.

Dutch ovens don't rate that high in Arizona. We know of few people who cook with them on even a sporadic basis. We have seven dutch ovens in various sizes, including a cool little "mini" oven we found in Utah last year. It's only about 3-4 inches across.
We used it for a table decoration for a long time until we realized it is the perfect garlic roaster. Yum. We also have about 9 other cast iron cookware pieces. Quite an assortment. Cooking with cast iron is our favorite method. Nothing beats cast iron, indoors, outdoors, anywhere.

Right now there about 225 Dutch oven items on Ebay. We just checked. You can get a pretty good idea of the collector value of the older ovens. You can also get some good recipe collections at reasonable rates via PDF file interchange after the auction. We paid some guy a couple of bucks and got some pretty good ideas. Do a web search for dutch oven recipes and you will be amazed at the results. Especially if you are thinking of cooking cobblers, particularly peach cobblers. A lot of river runners we know use aluminum dutch ovens. They are light enough to pack on a raft (or big volume kayak) and nothing beats dutch oven cooking on a river beach. The real pros even bake real yeast bread in them. We've never mastered that magic. We do mostly pot roasts, casseroles, chilis, potato dishes, corn breads and various vegetables. Cobblers once in awhile, too.

If you get tired of using cookie cutter charcoal briquettes, go to a Mexican market in West Phoenix or down in Tucson and buy a big bag of real mesquite charcoal. All of the pieces look like pieces of a mesquite tree only solid black. They work pretty good and you can "fine tune" your fire with them, too.

One trick we learned trying to get a good baked potato in a dutch oven with a 15 knot onshore wind in Rocky Point: Get a large galvanized bucket. Bigger than the Wal-Mart size. Put a layer of coals in it and then your oven. Size the bucket and oven so the oven has proper elbow room and headspace. Turn a galvanized oil change pan upside down and separate it from the other bucket with rebar pieces. The wind will be strong enough to give oxygen to the coals without altering your even temperature. You can get a 400 degree oven and keep it there even in a strong wind!

One other trick for getting coals up to temp and keeping them there: a barrel air pump you can buy at Wal-Mart for inflating little boats and air mattresses. Splice a piece of copper tubing onto the hose and mash down the end of the tubing so you get the Venturi effect working for you. You'll feel like a real surgeon working on those coals! Sure beats heck out of trying to blow on them, especially when you've had too many beers and nearly fall face first into those hot coals. Trust us, the barrel pump is a whole lot better alternative. Besides, when you're cooking with cast iron, you're not worried about weight, either the weight of the ovens and skillets or your own body weight from eating all of the good stuff you cook with cast iron.

We've also learned it's a lot more fun to use dutch ovens when the outdoor temperatures aren't over 90 degrees. Kinda shoots about six months of the year in Arizona!

Well, happy cooking

J&S, on the road in Sloughouse, CA

PS--We aren't packing iron on this trip--dutch ovens that is. We're doing a "fire and ice free" trip. No camp fires and no cooler ice. Interesting combination, eh?

[Nighthiker]

For baking biscuits, I placed four pieces of 1/2 " rebar in the bottom of the dutch oven and place a pie pan on top of the pieces of rebar. I place biscuits in the pie pan to bake. The pie pan is raised off the bottom of the dutch oven working some what like a convection oven.

[olesma]

To raise the pan off the bottom of the Dutch oven I have also used small rocks, hex nuts, nails, bolts and alluminum cans we crushed.

Almost anything works in a pinch.