Dutch Oven Cooking

Contributed by Brian Brunsting

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The cadre I co-lead is in the middle of Dutch Oven Cooking and I wanted to share with you how we have gone about seeting up our dutch oven fairly inexpensively and a couple recipes we’ve used so far with success. Please share your experiences here as well as other recipes you would recommend.

 

Here is what we purchased:

• 8 quart dutch oven from Craigs List. It was a nice size, though it didn’t have any feet.

• Metal pail from Home Depot which we use as a stand when cooking

• Charcoal chimney and charcoal from Home Depot

 

Here is how we set it up (see photo):

• Place the pail upside down (minus the cover) on a table (I wouldn’t recommend a plastic table)

• Put dirt on the bottom of the pail (which is now upright)

• Cover with tinfoil

• Place bent metal staps of some kind (they were sitting on my workbench) on the tinfoil to use as a support for the oven.

• Place the computed number of charcoal bricketts around support.

• Place oven on supports

• Fill with yummy food

• Place charcoal on top

 

We didn’t want to purchase a dedicated dutch oven stand for cost and storage reasons, so we improvised to great affect so far with the pail. The pail doesn’t show any adverse effects and doesn’t get overly warm past an inch or so down. We use the charcoal chimney to get the charcoal going and that gets them ready in 5 minutes or so. In the photos you can see our dutch oven set up and cooking. In this photo we placed the pail cover over the top. We were running short on time and thought it might help direct the heat down a bit better. In the other photo you can see the two pieces of the support we use for the oven (bottom left), the oven and part of the pail.We use the same metal support idea for a cover stand. Something you might want when you need to set the cover down.

When we are done with the cooking we place the lower coals on the cover, place the cover on the stand, dump off the dirt, then turn the pail over, put some water in it, dump the hot coals in that and clean up. We then use the pail to store some of the items.

 

So far we made pizza (see attachment for recipe) and biscuits. I will upload the biscuit recipe later. For the biscuits we used both a pie plate (set on balls of tinfoil to keep it off the bottom) and a muffin tin. Both worked well. We actually did them both at the same time, stacked. We cooked them for about 30 minutes or so and swapped positions (top and bottom) half way through.