Wood Fire Cooking

“What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.”-Nora Ephron

For years my wife & I have been looking for the right equipment for wood fire cooking. After a long search, just last weekend we finally found an affordable ($18) Dutch oven with legs and a lid at a flea market. (Legs easily allow one to put coals under the pot.) We have also been looking for the ideal outdoor fire pit (www.firepit-and-grilling-guru.com/outdoor-fire-pit.html). We had a great time cooking hotdogs and S’Mores over a portable fire pit at a friend’s house. And recently visited another friend with a built in fire pit. But what we really want is an advance system with grills, shelves, arms, etc.

And yet, good equipment is only the beginning. In an excellent blog post, Learning to Cook on a Wood-Fired Stove, Deborah describes that no book held the secret to successful food fire cooking. She had to learn by trial and error:

The biggest challenge is keeping the oven heat even. Unlike a gas or electric stove, when you put something in the oven to cook and the temperature drops as the food absorbs the heat, nothing kicks in to compensate. What to do? Feed the fire wood that will burn quickly and offer more heat. As the food begins to cook and its internal temperature rises, a longer, slower-burning piece of wood will maintain the heat. Open the oven door if it gets too hot - but not for long. Your oven may even have "hot spots" like mine.

In addition to equipment and practical experience, a cook needs supplies and recipes. In Baking and Simple Cooking After a Disaster the author considers a time when “cooking as you once knew it, from cabinets bulging with a variety of packaged items, store bread and cookies, or a quick trips to the store for box cereal and meat in a neat packages, with an armful of deli tubs and rotisserie chicken – just ended.” Would you know how to cook using flour, salt, lard and other basics?

Bottom Line

If you want to learn survival-cooking skills, purchase or download some old-fashioned cookbooks. The Cooking After a Disaster post recommends …

We have several 1940 era cookbooks, Mennonite/Amish cookbooks and a thin book of ingredient substitutions as well as good, basic ones at least 30 years old. They’re priceless for simplicity, economy and few ingredients. This will mean going to the used bookstore or surfing Amazon. Avoid modern cookbooks that assume access to lots of ingredients and avoid cookbooks from the 1800s because they do not have standard measurements and assume things you might not know about like how to assemble ingredients, cooking times, pans and temperatures.

One of my favorite books is The Joy of Cooking (1965 edition). The Joy of Cooking has been in print continuously since 1936 and with more than 18 million copies sold. The older editions cover everything from butchering meat, ingredient substitution, simple sauces to complex dishes. It includes a lot of practical advice on techniques.

Another source that can be useful is modern versions of pioneer recipes. Check out Amazon’s Best Pioneer Cookbooks.