Primitive and modern outdoor skills

Dutch Oven Baking tricks

2016-11-20

Angie has been doing some AWESOME baking with the dutch oven lately. She made a couple of batches of cookies, as well as bread pudding, and I made a finish pancake. A friend asked us to share whatever tricks she used to get that all to come out so well.

Here's some cookies. These are supposed to be backed at ~350F. We don't have an *actual* dutch oven, just a nice cast-iron cookpot with a lid, so she turned the lid upside down and dumped coals in it using a small shovel.

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To keep it going for things that take a little while she throws small sticks on the coals that burn as well, keeping the coals a little more alive so they don't slowly die off. Having the pot hanging from a tripod rather than directly in the fire lets her control the heat of the bottom of the pot without having to super carefully manage the fire and coals. This makes it much easier to avoid burning the bottom of the cookies

Here's the rather delicious results.

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Here's my finish pancake cooking. Notice that we dumped a lot more coals on top of the pot, and the fire is a little hotter and/or the pot is closer to the fire. Finnish pancake is supposed to bake at ~450F. We probably got it a little over that because it cooked in the "expected" time... but it was much thicker than the recipe recommends

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This was my second time making finish pancake over a fire... The first time we did it at my friend's place using a grating. The bottom of the finish pancake burned slightly because the fire under it was too hot. It still came out good, but not nearly as perfect as this one did.

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Notice how it didn't stick to the bottom at all (it's brown on top because I used whole-wheat flour).

Delicious!