Old Tech for Some Fancy Cooking at the Campsite: Dutch Ovens in Modern Camping

So you are headed for the hills camping. Got the cooler packed with the old standbys do you? Hot dogs, marshmallows, premade hamburger patties? All ready for the great outdoors.

Just because you go to the woods to camp does not mean you have to leave nice cooking behind. Scrambled eggs and sausage in the morning, baked chicken, biscuits and cobbler in the evening, something good for lunch... Wait a minute! BAKED chicken? BISCUITS? COBBLER? You need an oven for that stuff! It cannot be cooked in the middle of the woods you say? Yes indeedy it can and it don't take no new fangled contraptions neither. You can learn to do it with something your grandma would have probably recognized. A Dutch oven.

I am not talking about one of those things, which you may have seen, that you stick in a regular oven. The kind that is basically a pot, maybe cast iron, with a lid that just sits in the oven and bakes something. Nope, a real Dutch oven has three legs, usually is round and has a lip around both the top and inside of the lid. It can be made of cast iron or aluminum and it gives you the ability to do some real cooking in the great outdoors.

Dutch ovens go way back, originating in the late 1600's in, of course, Holland. They really came to be an American "thing" during colonial times and moving westward. The Dutch oven can be used as a basic cooking pot, suspended above the campfire by its bailing wire handle or as a full fledged oven, sitting amid the coals on its tripod legs. After the advent of the electric oven, the Dutch oven then underwent a change, losing its legs and lipped lid, growing smaller to fit in the electric oven. Few people who used them from the 1950's onwards would ever guess their pioneering origins. Today a dedicated few still use original type Dutch ovens.

Other than nostalgia why would someone want to use these things you ask? Allow me to draw you picture. You arrive on a Friday evening for a weekend's camping. It is already getting dark in the campground and you have a minimum amount of time to get the tent set up and dinner prepared plus you would actually like to have time to set back with the family and relax at some point. Sounds impossible you say? Most of you would probably just have bought fast food on the way to the campground right? Not necessary. You can have a good meal, cooked while you are setting up camp and with a minimum amount of effort on your part. All you need is three Dutch ovens and to have prepared the meal before you left home.

You arrive at the campsite. First thing is to put some charcoal into a charcoal starter and get it going. Then get out your three Dutch ovens, two twelve inchers and a ten, and the food. Let us say that you are making a BBQ Chicken recipe so you have chicken breasts in a large ziplock baggy with the BBQ sauce (I like a Cola chicken recipe which uses ketchup and dry spices in separate baggies, I mix them onsite and add a can of cola, in the Dutch oven). You take them from the cooler, empty them into the twelve inch, six quart, Dutch oven, in a pan liner (it makes clean up easier) and then place this onto a bed of about eighteen coals. Place about twelve to fifteen coals onto the lid of the oven; this is why you have a lip around the top of the lid, to hold the coals on.

You then dump your already prepared cobbler mix into the next Dutch oven, also into a liner, and pour two cans of pie filler into the mix. Sit this oven on top of the first one and place another twelve to fifteen coals onto the lid of this oven.

Then you start to set up your tent and campsite. Every ten minutes or so you will want to check your chicken and cobbler and rotate the ovens and lids, in opposite directions, one clockwise, one counter-clockwise. By doing this you will rotate the "hotspots" of the coals away from the individual spots where they are heating to more evenly cook your food. If you have a child, of suitable maturity to be entrusted with fire, this is a fun task for them and you can "give them some responsibility" by entrusting them with watching over dinner, while you keep an eye on them of course. Depending on the recipe you use and how long it says to cook your meal, about fifteen minutes before the meal is done you should take the final Dutch oven, usually the ten inch or four quart one, and use it to cook biscuits. Canned biscuits are easiest, just line the oven with foil, spray in a little non-stick spray and place the biscuits along the bottom. Place on the lid and then stack this oven on top of the other two, placing about ten coals on the lid. Rotate it at least once as the biscuits bake.

During the course of cooking all of this you may need to replace burnt out charcoals with fresh ones so it is a good idea to keep a pile of burning charcoal in the fire pit. If you are cooking something which takes an hour or so to finish then you will want to add new charcoal to your pile every twenty minutes or so.

You may want to heat up some vegetables to go along with the chicken but, if you do this right, as soon as you are finished setting up your camp you will have a full meal ready to eat. What's more, it will not be hot dogs roasted over the campfire either. Clean up will be easy also, if you used pan liners or foil. If you did not, cast iron is still not difficult to clean, just boil water in it scrub it out and then oil it down. In the morning you can use a Dutch oven to make all sorts of "breakfast bakes" or the lids can be flipped over and used for a griddle. Needless to say the Dutch oven can be hung from a frame or a tripod, over a fire, and used for a cooking pot. Stews are exceptionally good when cooked in cast iron.

With proper care and maintenance, cast iron may last for years, even centuries. I personally have cast iron frying pans which are more than one hundred years old and I regularly use them. Cast iron Dutch ovens are cared for just like any other cast iron cookware. Aluminum ovens are a new beast and have their own care guides which come with the oven when you purchase it.

If you decide to get into Dutch oven cooking there are few things you need to know and a few things you may consider purchasing to help you out. First, things you need to know. For starting out you may just want to consider twelve inch, six quart, and ten inch, four quart, cast iron Dutch ovens. These are good enough to start with and the "Lodge" named brand may be purchased for a decent price, usually $30-$50, at Wal-Mart or a similar store. Lodge is a good named brand, as is Cabella's, and cast iron is a good starting point. Aluminum takes some getting used to and is usually used by those who know more about what they are doing.

There are some cheaper ovens to be had, usually at the "cheap" tool stores but watch out, these frequently lack a tight fitting inner lip on the lid. Always check to make certain the lid fits on tightly. This is important since pressure is a large part of the cooking process in Dutch oven cooking.

Whichever type you get, you will need to cure it before you first use it, even if it says it is "pre cured" or "pre seasoned." To do this, you simply place it in your electric oven, upside down, at around 500 degrees for about two hours. If you purchased one which came in a packing grease or wax then you may wish to place a drip pan underneath of the Dutch oven. Almost all Cast iron is shipped in a sealant wax. If you have a self cleaning oven, you may simply run the self cleaning feature with the Dutch oven inside. By the way, this is a good way to strip any old, dirty cast iron. Once you have shut the oven off and the cast iron has cooled enough to handle, then you may rub it down with Crisco or any like shortening. Allow the shortening to melt into the iron. Apply several coats and heat again, though not to the same degree, just enough to melt the shortening into the iron. After you have applied at least three coats of shortening oil it is a good idea to put a finish layer of regular vegetable oil over the top and then dry the iron off and store it until ready to use. Your first use should be for something high in fat content like pork or a chicken dish. Stay away from anything high is acids like vinegars.

As for helpful items to purchase along with your oven, you may want to consider a "lid lifter." This is a device which will allow you to pick up the hot lid, with the coals on it, to check the food in the oven. It latches onto the handle of the lid and braces against the lid itself. Personally, I made one on my forge but you can purchase them in stores or order them from Cabella's. You lid lifter should also be able to double as a lifter for the whole Dutch oven by picking up the bailing wire handle when the oven is hot. Cabela's ahs good Dutch oven accessories but they are a little pricey.

You may have noticed I spoke of "liners." These are nothing more than aluminum cake pans, which you may purchase in the grocery store, slightly smaller sized than your Dutch oven. For a ten inch oven there is a great 9 ¾ inch pan out there. It fits perfectly inside the oven and makes clean up a snap. If you are baking pies in your oven, simply use a pie plate and set it down in the oven. Liners for the twelve inch oven are harder to come by but it can be liner with aluminum foil to help with cleanup. For stews and the like, I cook directly in the cast iron.

A good, sturdy tripod is handy if you want to use your Dutch oven as a cooking pot. Wal-mart has some but they look too flimsy to me. A decent blacksmith can make a good one for you; I made one on my forge in a couple of hours. I must admit, I have not seen one for sale commercially which I would trust to hold up a fully loaded six quart Dutch oven. A cross frame for a fire pit will also do this job. Again, you may have one made by a blacksmith but these may be purchased from Cabela's either online or through their catalog.

A charcoal "starter chimney" is also very handy to have if you are going to be cooking with a Dutch oven. Chimneys may be purchased almost anywhere these days, from grocery stores to the various "-mart" type stores. Even your hardware type stores may have them. Prices vary greatly but you want to make sure you get one with a heat shield between the actual chimney and the carrying handle. With fuel prices what they are these days lighter fluid is getting costlier and costlier, not to mention it is bad for the environment. A starter chimney uses no fluid and naturally lights charcoal in about ten minutes. Once you get a chimney going you can keep a good size pile of charcoal going by dumping it out and carefully adding to it. Along with a chimney, a good pair of long handle tongs is handy for moving the charcoal to the lids of the Dutch ovens. Nothing fancy is required and these may be purchased at any dollar type store.

Of course you will want a couple of good pot holders, the kind which you do not mind getting into ashes and which rinse out easily, since the outside of the Dutch ovens tend to be covered in ashes.

This is the trick in Dutch oven cooking, for the OUTSIDE to be covered in ashes but not the INSIDE. You must use care every time you remove a lid to check the food and this is something you must do regularly to check for burning. Remember to rotate your ovens and your lids, one clockwise and one counter clockwise to avoid spot burning. As for recipes, there is a wealth of them on the internet and cookbooks abound. Once you get used to the adaptation of the number of charcoals above and beneath the oven, matching the heat in the oven, you will find you can adapt almost any slow cooker recipe to the Dutch oven. For that matter, most slow cooker recipes probably originated with Dutch oven recipes in the first place.

Nothing beats a Dutch oven cobbler and I found that, on Halloween night, my Dutch oven, hanging over a bed of charcoal, full of spiced cider made a wonderful treat for the parents and kids of the neighborhood as they came around trick-or-treating. I thought that, in this day and age, no one would dare try something like that, "ooo its not packaged," but they did and they loved it. The warm cider got a lot of nice compliments on a cool night as did the sight of an old fashioned "iron pot" hanging from a tripod over a "fire" (ok it was a bit of charcoal in a rock lined pit, but it looked good). Frankly, I was amazed at the interest in the Dutch oven. People had never heard of one and simple would not believe me when I told them I could bake a cake in it.

I always keep mine well oiled and ready to go. Whether it is for camping or prolonged power outages, such as the three weeks we went without power (but not good food) when Hurricane Isabel came through, my Dutch ovens see regular use both in camp and at home. Old fashioned? Perhaps, but what is wrong with that? They work and work well. In todays over priced and over blown modern world maybe it is time we began to get back in touch with some of our past which is still dependable. Besides, I think food cooked this way just tastes good. If you do much camping, or live somewhere with frequent power outages or you just would like to try something a bit old fashioned, maybe Dutch ovens are for you.