Dutch ovening & other efficient cooking methods

[Defender]

When (fuel) resources become scarce you won't be able to just pop something in the microwave or the gas/electric oven anymore.

Lets talk about alternative cooking methods: solar, dutch ovens, hobo/thermos cooking, brick ovens as well as recipes for them.

[Heimdhal]

A well insulated thermos (the kind you can carry around) can keep water near boiling for hours. THere was a thread on GIM about it a while ago (couple years IIRC) with recipes where one would simply add some boiling water and beans in a thermos and let it sit over night, or bring it to work with them etc and it would still be pipping hot hours later and fully cooked. A BIIG energy saver.

Never tried it myself, but I've heard good things about the method.

Here let me try to find the link for you.....

...oh wait...... >:(

[cigarlover]

I was looking at doing an outdoor kitchen with a wood fired oven. I love pizza so this would work out well. Surprisingly affordable too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1pImQPIAAY&playnext_from=TL&videos=xjt-vLTdpJE

Lots of different ones on the side as well. Also probably some dIY ones there somewhere.

[coopersmith]

CL, there is a dyi article on building an outdoor oven in the new mother earth news. It looks to be well written and quite informative.

[AOW]

I've got a wood cookstove going in the back sunroom nearly every day. It's a lot of fun to cook and bake on and it heats up the back room so it's an extension of our house instead of an extension of outside. Mine is similar to this one:

http://images.craigslist.org/3n33pe3l35V45U05S1a4178cda2388d0f1f3e.jpg


I make the same easy bread recipe ImaCannin posted with a caserole dish in the oven and it comes out fantastic.

[CrufflerJJ]

A well insulated thermos (the kind you can carry around) can keep water near boiling for hours. THere was a thread on GIM about it a while ago (couple years IIRC) with recipes where one would simply add some boiling water and beans in a thermos and let it sit over night, or bring it to work with them etc and it would still be pipping hot hours later and fully cooked. A BIIG energy saver.

Never tried it myself, but I've heard good things about the method.

If you google "thermal cooker", you'll find some good links. The Thermos brand is said to be pretty good. You might want to avoid the Sunpentown brand (thin container bottoms, resulting in burned food). I bought a used Thermos unit last year off FleaBay, and it works very well. It's currently stashed up in the attic for "just in case" use, but works well for cooking soups/stews & such.

[Sock Puppy]

A pressure cooker uses much less energy than traditional methods. I've never used one over a fire, however.

--SP

[CrufflerJJ]

A pressure cooker uses much less energy than traditional methods. I've never used one over a fire, however.

--SP


I used one over our camp stove a couple years ago (10 day Ike-related power outage), and it worked just fine. I think that if you use it over a wood camp fire, you'd need some way of raising/lowering it over the flames or coals. Another approach might be to add or remove coals from under the pressure cooker to maintain temperature/pressure.