The First Meal

[Music] it is a beautiful fall day on the homestead wonderful crisp air the beautiful color starting to come out in the trees it's time to try this oven out we have lots of hungry folks here it's time to cook an entire meal right here in the oven ryan we've got a lot of mouths to feed what are we cooking okay so i wanted to go through old recipes and pick out things that i thought were going to be really neat in the oven that we just made so we've got the we've got the baked beans yeah that we're going to be working on and all the ingredients over here we're going to go to that rye and indian bread next and then we've got the beef pasty we're working that up followed by the pear tart it's like a full meal and all these things sort of they connect right here to the frontier right and they all are gonna go in this one firing in the oven yes yeah so the beans would pretty much be in there the whole time yeah and everything else will be moving in and out so we'll be able to cook multiple things at one time but also have like these four different stages of cooking yeah and because we only need to do one firing we're saving time we're saving fuel this really all connects together and it's going to be a great fall meal so first thing that we're going to do is get the beans going because they're going to take the longest amount of time they're going to be in there the whole time we've got a vessel here with pre-cooked soaked beans they're ready to go and it's about three-quarter of the way full we're going to add cubed pork dry mustard salt and pepper and some molasses and then a whole onion i remember from that first episode you gotta butter this lid really well or else uh it'll glue itself down you can't get it open okay so we've been burning this oven for four maybe even five hours it's heated up all the way from the morning but we should only need to heat this once for this whole thing and it's down to coals and we know it's ready because if you look inside there the interior is not black like like right here right it's already gotten so hot that it's burnt the soot away so the inside is nice and well just exactly the color of the clay so perfect we know it's totally up to heat maybe even almost brick colored so we need to scrape all this fire out so we can start to actually cooking it we don't cook with the fire in it like you might think we got to drag all this fire out and then we can let it rest for a second then it's time to put things in we want to cook yeah i'm still like enamored with the sheer size of this thing it's uh it's really well insulated it's not too hot to rest your hand on right um i hope it stays hot for a long long time easy this thing this thing will stay hot three four hours to be able to cook in it this oven is so hot i had to change from the fire egg to the longer handled rook just because if you get your six six inches inside of there with your hand it's just cooking you already you ready for me to mop this yeah mop that out it cleans it out cools off the floor sometimes the floor gets too hot especially for bread so we gotta sort of get all that moisture in there it cools off the floor um temperature we don't have a thermometer right so we reach our hand in there and you kind of gotta gauge it so uh this is um we should be able to stick our hand in there for 10 seconds or so this is about a five second oven right now it's gotta cool off it's got to get a consistent heat all the way around so we're going to put the door on it let it rest for a few minutes we'll get a nice consistent heat then we'll put the beans in the beans are in the oven and i put them on a trivet because i wanted to get those off the floor so they didn't cook too fast on the bottom trivets can be really important in these ovens so we've used that problem is we're going to need another trivet now a couple of months ago i would have just used some rocks and we can use that three rocks but you got to be really careful and things fall off of your rocks so we need another trivet now we've got a blacksmith shop so we're gonna have brandon work on another trivet for us so we can use it on our next dish that is yeah so we're gonna go with the ryan indian loaf which is a simple three-part bread and it is cornmeal wheat flour rye flour some yeast a little bit of water and this particular one we're going to use a sweetening agent that's maple syrup and that's just going to make that yeast go crazy and a touch of salt because all bread likes a little bit you have to have salt after that i'm going to be working on this pie it's a pit it's a pasty beef pasty going to be the steak that i've cubed up i'm going to salt and pepper it to taste and then there's going to be a little bit of red wine that goes in i've cut a hole in the top crust for a vent and later on when we pulled out the oven we're going to put some butter in there just to melt as it rests [Music] our bread dough is in our dish that we're actually going to bake it in this is this loaf does not hold up on its own very well so it's great if you can bake it right in a pan i've made sure to butter it well actually ryan buttered it well so that it doesn't stick in there and now it's time for it to rise this rises a bit like normal bread what we're going to do is we're going to cover it up but it's not going to rise a whole bunch like regular bread does just a little bit when the surface cracks a little we know it's just risen enough then it's time to go in i'm going to set this aside [Music] here you go one trivet perfect exactly what we need thanks brandon that's great this pie is ready to go in let me just take it wait did you get nutmeg in there i'm cooking with you john of course i did [Music] do [Applause] all right so we've got our beans in the oven they're still cooking uh the bread's in there with it right now the pie just was taken out and it looks fantastic next we need a dessert yeah we're gonna do a pear tart it's really simple we've got the crust already ready to go we're gonna lay these pears in there kind of spiral and layer them with sugar put a little bit of butter and of course some nutmeg [Music] and these pears are not just sliced up pear we had to parboil these pears to make sure they were nice and soft [Music] [Applause] all right so we've got our tart in there now the bread and the beans are still in there so three things in the oven at once and this is still like i can't hold my hand there for very long it's still nice and warm in fact this is perfect we haven't had fire in this for like four hours and just the right heat to have the beans in right at the very beginning the meat pie is already cooked and it had to cook at a higher temperature it's sitting here cooling so that we can actually eat it doesn't isn't too hot and there's still plenty of residual heat to keep though to keep the bread cooking which it needs to do and then the tart it would have burnt if we would have put it in too soon now it's the perfect temperature maybe like 350 degrees in there after four hours and it's hot on the outside this may be hotter on the outside now than it was when we started this couldn't have worked out better for this homestead situation it is holding the heat and you can cook we can cook so much in this this is amazing really after we pulled that out we could still put loaves of bread in there if we wanted to bake for for a while afterwards and then dry herbs and it's amazing [Music] [Applause] [Music] there you go john the first meal out of the oven yeah i'm excited to try this out i'm doing a great job picking out all these recipes out of the past out of the back catalog thank you perfect set those beans i think beans that was first season [Music] and they are still really good yeah i like them with the syrup in there i don't know if i've tried it i know that we did a version with molasses i don't think i tried those uh this syrup is cheating man it's really good you know i i think the meat pie cooked long enough i was a little worried about that bottom crust oh wow but puff paste does not do that well in the bottom sometimes it's good though that wine in the in the in the meat pie i like that a lot i like this bread it's got a lot of body it's not like a sopping up the bottom of the plate bread you know it's it's it's a meal to itself almost well it's it's a lot like a cornbread but still you know fluffy enough yeah but it goes well with the beans like cornbread goes well with beans you know right i have never had a pear tart you know i don't eat them that often i remember the first episode where we had this pear tart and i'm gonna bet that this one turned out better than that one um oh yeah um was that one in an earthen oven i think we baked it in an earthen oven it was in might have been season three i'm not sure but the the the pears were i don't know the wrong kind or whatever they were kind of metallic-y which can happen with pears you don't get that at all right now and this one's perfect so this oven gives us a chance to cook not only just for a single family or a single person but multiple families or in the case of a single family you're cooking something that's going to last you for three or four days yeah or maybe all week right you can get a week's worth of cooking done in this and especially when you think about like we could be putting loaves in there now yeah right and we could be drying herbs like you said earlier so it's pretty neat but all at one time like the amount of food that we cooked right now we could probably feed three or four families oh yeah definitely everything was so good thanks ryan and the pear tart way too good ate it all shouldn't have done that uh you know what next i really can't wait to find out just how many loaves of bread we can fit in that oven yeah that's gonna be a great episode that's what we're gonna probably be doing next because i want to i want to bake more in that oven and ryan here the camp cook is usually behind the bar in the nutmeg tavern that's the live stream we do 4 p.m eastern every friday we always always have fun i hope you can join us for that and i want to thank you for coming along today as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century

Channel: Townsends

Views: 559,873

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, mud oven, cob oven, baking, baked beans, beef paste, pear tart

Id: 6bEZrN1OJEM

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020