Dutch Oven Baking: Getting To Know The Utensil

hi I'm John Thompson today we're embarking on a series about baking and roasting in this very versatile utensil here the Dutch oven thanks for joining us today on 18th century cooking there's a very interesting book that was published in the early 19th century it was published in 1837 but it was actually written in 1832 and it's by Katherine Strickland Parr it's called the back woods of Canada and she originally wrote this book as a series of letters to her sister talking about life on the frontier in Canada and it's really amazing she has a whole section of the books where she talks about dutch ovens or she calls them baked kettles now as a regular English proper English woman she probably wouldn't have used something like this in her regular home but she definitely found they were amazingly useful on the frontier and let's hear a little bit about what she says about baked kettles she says at first I was inclined to grumble and rebel against the Expediency of bake pans or big kettles but as cooking stoves iron stoves or and even brick and clay bill Evans will not start up at your booted bidding in the bush these substitutes are valuable and perform a number of uses I have eaten excellent light bread baked on immigrant hearts in one of these kettles I've eaten boiled potatoes baked meats excellent stews good soups and all L cooked at different times in this useful a universally useful utensil so let it not be despised it is one of those things particularly adapted to the circumstances of settlers in the bush before they have collected those comforts about their homesteads within and without that are the reward and the slow gleaning up of many years toil so you can see how much she loved to use this very versatile tool and you know it's one thing to say fry in one of these or bake a soup or I mean cook a soup or stew in a kettle like this but it's another to learn how to bake and to roast it where you really have to regulate the temperatures that's what we'll be focusing on today again it might not seem that easy but with a little study we'll get it so let's look at the anatomy of this Dutch oven for a little bit before we get started warming it up you can see that it's got a lid the special lid dutch ovens this this lid this idea the rim on here is specifically so that we can put coals up on top of this and them not fall off this really is sort of an an American invention right there in the late 18th century in the early 19th century it really kind of sets these apart and makes them specifically good for this purpose so this helps with the specific idea of Dutch oven baking which is that we want to have heat underneath the cooking pot and we want to have coals up on top to give you heat from both directions now one of the things that will happen is once you get this idea you'll think well I know I'll just pile coals up on top of this pot and that really is the problem we don't want to have too much on top or else we'll just overheat this will get too much heat in too rapidly and burn whatever we're cooking so it really is a balance between getting enough heat a below and above but not too much that's what we're going to be studying here in just a moment another thing we really need to do to bacon this properly is a good bed of coal so you have a lot of pre-prepared coals you can't cook with flaming logs you really need to have nice deep medicals and coals you can keep getting from the fire so if you don't have a good Bank of them ready to go then you might run out just when you need it more also there are environmental factors to take into consideration ambient temperature outside really isn't that important that you have to really keep in mind but wind is if you've got a lot of wind coming in it'll hit that pot and take away the heat and so it can be very difficult to bake so if you've got a windy situation you're going to need to protect that Dutch oven baking area from a lot of that wind you'll need to make some kind of a windbreak if you go searching online you'll likely find formulas for baking with Dutch and the formula usually goes something like this if you want to get to 350 degrees you take the inches of your Dutch oven say a 10-inch Dutch oven and you put three up and three down you take the number of inches you put take 10 charcoal briquettes and for the top you put 13 on and you do seven underneath so three minus and three plus but since we're not using charcoal briquets usually in a historic atmosphere like this we're going to be using hardwood hardwood coals so they aren't the same size as a charcoal briquette and they usually burn much hotter so we have to experiment more we have to use our experience to get the right temperature so when we're baking in a Dutch oven we're trying to get the air temperature inside the Dutch oven to oven temperatures right 300 350 degrees we don't actually usually want to have our actual food right up against the side of the Dutch oven and so we want to bring our food up off the off of the floor away from the walls so many times we'll use a trivet something like this sometimes we can use little stones and a baking dish especially for baking bread or some kind of pie in our oven we want to have the pie plate up off the bottom with a trivet and we want to bake in something like this again we're trying to get this the air temperature up to the right to give you an idea what's happening inside the Dutch oven we've actually got a modern heat probe in here and a little device so we can we can actually read the temperature of the inside of the Dutch oven as we put coals on top and underneath we can watch and that will give us an idea about exactly what we're going to do in the future let's start off experimenting with just a scoop full of coals down below that we will spread out and another scoopful that we will spread on the top of the lid here and make sure they're all around the edge not necessarily in the center there you go it's only been in a minute or two and just that handful of coals is older you raise the temperature 160 degrees and still going higher okay our temperature seemed to level off at about 200 degrees so let's put another scoop full now light scoopful on the lid and see what happens so it's been 10 minutes with so we've had just one scoop at the bottom two scoops on top our temperature is already to 260 degrees so you can see it really doesn't take too long to to get it up to almost baking temperatures obviously we'll need a little bit more to get it to where we would want to bake bread or something you have to really be careful about taking the lid off and checking your baking a lot if you do that you'll extend the baking period a great deal because the temperature will go down inside the oven a lot well we're just about to 350 degrees in the internal temperature here we've got two scoops of hardwood coals underneath and three scoops up on the lid and this is a 12-inch Dutch oven if you're working with a smaller Dutch oven obviously you'll need fewer coals and a bigger one of obviously more coals and as these coals die down they'll need to be replenished so you can see you have to be kind of you have to be watching this all the time and the more you bake like this the easier it will become so there's a lot of heat not only going down from the lid of this but coming up off of the lid and one of the beauties of dutch ovens is you can stack them up to conserve your coals so that these this set of coals on this lid will actually be the bottom coals for another Dutch oven that's up on top so we preheated this oven it's well well up into temperature in fact what we'd like to do is go ahead and bake bread while this is hot now bread needs to be really hot 450 425 degrees so we put an extra scoop down below and an extra scoop on top now with this 12-inch Dutch oven it's completely level on top and it should be about up to temperature and I've got some dough that's already ready to go in the oven this is risen so let's get it in the oven and get it baking you well here's the bread it's um well it's not right out of the oven because I let it cool down it's still really really warm the problem with baking bread at an event is you really need to let it totally cool off maybe even all night long until the next day for the crumb to set up now I'm gonna cheat I'm gonna rip this bread open we're gonna have some right away it smells wonderful it's still steaming inside the crumb had set up enough so it should be perfect mmm bread right out of the oven Wow this this bread was really it really was not so difficult at all in the Dutch oven you have to pay attention to it you have to have a little experiment experience and you you have to do some you probably have to fail on three or four loops before you get it this one probably could use just a little bit more heat underneath but again I mean we're still we're still learning and it is so simple and you can do it at an event without great quantities of equipment just a simple batch oven bread is so wonderful when you can bake it out an event I'm telling you everybody will love you I want to thank you for coming along as we continue to experiment and and have these experiences with this food as we savor the flavors in the aromas of the 18th century if you're new to our channel I want to welcome you you can subscribe by clicking the button right up here also check out our related videos thanks so much for watching you

Channel: Townsends

Views: 321,452

Rating: 4.9599514 out of 5

Keywords: dutch oven, reenacting, jon townsend, jas townsend and son, reenacting event, cooking, baking, camping, campfire, outdoors, bread, firepit, 18th century

Id: NGBvqNJ8H-U

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/agedmanofwar]

He made a legit dugout canoe using the burning and hollowing method. Then stored it under water over winter I think? Definitely goes hardcore to understand 18th century living.

[u/Benway23]

You are right, this guy is pretty cool.

[u/ladylilithparker]

Yasssss!

[u/Venkman427]

indubadibly

[u/Wereling]

100 percent co-signed

[u/OGDuckWhisperer]

One of my favorite memories from Cub Scouts/Boy Scouts was making chocolate cherry cake in a Dutch oven over an open fire. We would use cherry Coke and mix it with chocolate cake mix, and whoo boy it was good.

[u/Nathan-Parker]

18th century espionage?