Dutch Oven camp Hacks

today on coal cracker bushcraft we're going to talk about why this is the last vessel for cooking you will ever need [Music] all right so the seriousness is over we are honestly talking about dutch ovens i'm going to teach you some tips and tricks some ways you can utilize this that you might have never thought of before some features to look for if you're gonna get one because to be honest cast iron dutch ovens play a huge role in bushcraft cooking and if you have one and you know what you're doing with it you can make any meal any meal you could ever want okay so we're gonna just start with parts of the dutch oven things that i think are important again this is from my experience out here cooking over campfires cooking for groups things like that so let's start with the lid now you're going to see there are two different style lids that come on cast iron dutch ovens some are domed and some have this lip i think that buying one um for overall use with a lip on it like this is more important okay the reason why is and we're gonna get to this here in a second is we want to be able to put coals on top of the lid to help cook downward when we are cooking so this rim allows the coals not to slide off they just lay on top nicely and you're good to go it also serves as another purpose coming up but for now i would highly recommend get one with a lip now the next thing is you can buy dutch ovens without little legs on them again i like them with legs for two reasons so these legs now create space between the bottom of the dutch oven and the ground in which it is sitting on this allows us to put hot coals underneath and not per se have to have the hot coals directly touching the bottom of the cast iron hence not burning our food now another nice feature with the legs is that if you are using some type of grill grate okay and you place your cast iron there it is not going to slide off of this there's no chance of it getting spilled unless you knock the entire grate over so those legs act as a little safety device in there to keep this from moving around and if you're using utilizing this cast iron in other ways that you're going to be putting pressure on the sides or anything like that with scraping again it's not going to slide around it's stationary and then lastly is a feature that i absolutely love and i actually use all the time so when you're cooking things that are going to give off steam you can put your lid on of course and trap the steam on the inside but sometimes you might be trying to reduce liquid in your dutch oven as you're cooking it and if you take off the lid and the fire has a lot of embers or ash flying around all that's getting in your food so some dutch ovens actually have this little cutout right here you can see so there's this little cut out and that is a steam vent now what's nice about this is on the lid there is also get the right angle there is also another little notch and when these two notches are matched up like this it creates a vent hole and allows steam to escape it's a great feature not all cast iron has that but it's something that i would recommend if you're buying this for the first or ninth time so they're the features that i enjoy in a dutch oven or things that i look for when i'm purchasing new cast iron now from that point forward we're going to talk about actually cooking and number one most important thing when it comes to one of these is heat control if i would hand a dutch oven to somebody who never used one ever and i said let's cook with this there's a campfire what are they gonna do they're most likely gonna grab this thing place it on the campfire or the grill grate and cook from the bottom up that's fine okay that's normally how you're gonna start but what you need to realize with cast iron is that number one cast iron heats up so once our metal gets up to temperature we don't need to keep adding more temperature or more heat to it the cast iron being hot will generally keep cooking items for a good amount of time probably longer than you would even expect so one part of cooking with cast iron is not only to get it hot and keep it over the fire but also understand that we regulate the heat by not only letting the fire die down but also by removing the cast iron when you remove it the heat that's already in the metal and the metal heated up is going to keep cooking your items so you need to take that into consideration the second part of heat control comes with this lip that i was talking about heating items just from the bottom will not cook a large variety of the things that we would possibly cook in here think about biscuits we put the biscuits inside we start heating them from the bottom generally the heat won't work their way all the way through and cook the top of the biscuit and make it golden brown like an oven would just because it's just coming from the bottom so we can combat that we can utilize the top of this dutch oven by placing hot coals on top of it when we do that the top cover is going to get hot radiate heat down and cook the top of our food no matter what that is be a pie or like i said biscuits and lastly is how do we maximize the use of our cast iron so generally we think of a pot and we think okay we're going to just put liquids in here bring the liquids to a boil and that's it much like our stovetop but you need to really look at this vessel as an all-in-one everything so we think the morning you're gonna make bacon and eggs you can really easily just put this over the campfire heat it up put your eggs in here cook your bacon in here and um do everything you need you don't need to carry a separate pan if you have one of these it's like a common sense thing but people overlook it all the time they think i don't i don't have a pan i only have my dutch oven there's nothing i can do you can cook everything in this thing now if you're cooking two or three or four things okay you can cook your bacon and eggs inside here and then we can take our lid and flip it this way okay we can cook our pancakes on top of here if we want because this too is part of the cooking instrument that we have so don't be afraid to use the lid as a pan to cook eggs bacon hamburgers hot dogs whatever you need to do but i mean if you're cooking hot dogs they probably should be with a stick over the fire who doesn't love that now on to one of those funky things if the campfire is being used up for other purposes let's say there's a lot of people camping and everybody's doing their own thing and you want to cook something up okay that you would normally cook on a pan but you have no option or maybe you don't have a grill grate that you can set down and put your lid on top of in that case what i would recommend doing is taking a bunch of hot coals and actually putting them inside your dutch oven and then placing your lid upside down on top of your dutch oven just like this you can move that off the campfire those hot coals although you are going to smother them out are still going to heat this up enough that you can cook on top of this so you have now a portable grill you can take along with you away from the campfire cook your little meal eat it in peace and quiet while the other people fight over the flames now going along with that you can also place down the lid this way okay if you're cooking something like pizza and then you can place this over the top of the lid okay what that's going to do is that's just going to give you a little bit more easy access after the dish is done that you can get it off of the skillet part itself so if you make a deep dish pizza which we have made in this before a little bit tougher to get out if you do it this way and it's a little bit thinner crust and cook it that way it works out absolutely great now you can still put hot coals on top of here which you're going to need to do remember anything that you would normally bake in an oven you need to have top and bottom heat when cooking with your dutch oven and with all those wild tips i have just set you light years ahead everybody else at the campsites this summer that's right um all this stuff is fun it's easy and once you hear about it you should remember it just about forever all right and that's it that is my cast iron dutch oven talk for today i hope you all enjoyed it it is so nice out i'm going to do something just without the camera by myself in the woods i'm excited to get out there i'm so happy this weather has changed so i hope you're getting outside today or in the next few days or just every day if you can and uh definitely enjoy it so this was dan wallock a cold cracker bushcraft as always check us out at coldcrackerbushcraft.com and until the next video stay in the woods wait before you go you know i wrote my first book that's right bushcraft kid a comprehensive guide to all things bushcraft great for beginners to learn new skills great for advanced individuals that want to go and touch up on skills or maybe you forgot some of those things over the years you can check this thing out reference back and get yourself right back on page so you can go and pre-order this thing on amazon i have the link down below and once you do that then you can stay in the woods

Channel: Coalcracker Bushcraft

Views: 379,102

Keywords: Coalcracker Bushcraft, Dan Wowak, Appalachian Bushman School, Camping, Hiking, Survival, Bushcraft, Survival Skills, Bushcraft Skills, outdoorlifestyle, survivalinstructor

Id: ZQNW9NHIReU

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2022