Unlocking the Mysteries of the Dutch Oven

The modern Dutch Oven (DO) has always intrigued me. A versatile cooking vessel, most often made of cast iron, it is used with hot coals below it, but also on the lid. In this way heat is generated from above as well as below, cooking more evenly.

I should state up front that I’m primarily talking about the outdoor/camping type of DO, not the enameled kitchen style. I’m also most definitely not talking about the silly (although somewhat amusing) slang term. Moving right along…

Last year I got a great deal on a new 12″ DO from Camp Chef. They are probably the most common brand of DO I see around, along with Lodge. There are also aluminum DOs from Snow Peak for example, but these are much less common and I have no firsthand experience using one. In fact, I had never used a DO, and only once had a bite of anything made from one before purchasing this model for myself.

Still, over the years I’d read about them, and seen many associated photos. Friends like Dan Cole (@jeepin_idaho) of The 4×4 Podcast wrote of the wonders they had created with their versatile DOs: stews, breads, cobblers, cakes… Even pizza! I don’t know about you, but I can say without reservation that I like to eat all that stuff. So I think my fascination with these mysterious iron pots was understandable.

I purchased the DO online, along with a “lid lifter” and a padded carrying bag, and they were delivered to my doorstep soon after. I duly unpacked and admired them. And then they sat around for several months before I actually got around to using them.

There was an article on Dutch Ovens in a recent issue of Overland Journal. That got me thinking that I really needed to get off my proverbial rear and try to use mine. There had also been a Dutch Oven cook-off at Desert Rendezvous 2013, and another would be held at Mountain Rendezvous 2013. Cooking up something for the latter seemed infinitely preferable to bringing along a couple of bags of Doritos or something for the Saturday night potluck as well.

I’d read the basics about how DOs worked, and I’d seen numerous tasty-sounding recipes over the years. I had no idea what to try first. There was a simple-looking peach cobbler recipe in the Overland Journal article, and I couldn’t recall a cobbler I hadn’t liked, so I decided to go for it. This would be me first attempt at cooking with my DO, so even in the worst case it would be a good learning experience.

So, it turned out to be a good learning experience.

The recipe was simple: Chuck in some canned peaches, pour in some cake batter mix, top with pads of butter and optionally some cinnamon and sugar.

It wasn’t a total disaster, really. Maybe 90%, but not 100%. And my problems were avoidable, had I known enough to avoid making the mistakes I did. Thus, my learning experiences:

1. I learned that Dutch Ovens are not magically immune to what we refer to in the computer industry as GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Using canned peaches and cheap store-bought cake mixes (as called for in the recipe) was never going to yield a gourmet or artisanal dessert.

2. There was no direction in the recipe to stir up the powdery cake mix, so we didn’t. I had thought that perhaps the boiling ingredients would take care of that. Nope. Some did absorb fluids or otherwise come out as intended, but there were also many patches of unmixed powder. Nasty.

3. The recipe called for the top of the ingredients to optionally be sprinkled with cinnamon and/or sugar. That ended up leaving a sticky, melted sugar residue on the inside of the top lid of my DO, even though the DO was pre-seasoned. To this day I’ve been unable to get that residue off of the lid, even with soap, boiling water and scrubbing.

4. Most other cobbler recipes for the DO seem to use Bisquick (or something similar) rather than cake mix. I’d agree with that substitution, unless maybe you have a much higher tolerance for sugary sweetness than I do.

5. One thing I did right was based off of other experiences, and that was to try out this new cooking at home and not out in camp somewhere for the first time. If things went badly (which they did), there were plenty of other edible options at hand. Disappointment is doubled in the field, when it comes to food. Also, I purchased two dozen bricks to make a temporary oven base on my back patio, and that worked out quite well.

Getting the coals ready with help from my Snow Peak torch, aka Der Flammenwerfer.

We ate some of the cobbler, which was mostly edible but not great. There was a ton of it, and most of it was discarded. The Dutch Oven, I had learned, was surely not some magical device. It was a versatile and effective cooking device, but it was still very possible to produce poor results, as my first attempt clearly showed.

After the cobbler disaster, it was time to step back and regroup. I considered making a chili of some sort, but eventually I had a better idea: bread. My wife Carrie makes great bread, in several varieties. By starting with a known good recipe, and something simple, we’d have a better chance of success. We just needed to guess the correct amount of coals to use (every online resource disagrees with the others!) and cross our fingers.

As it turned out, we ended up baking the French bread for an extra 5 minutes (beyond the original 30) and it came out great! What a relief. We also were able to bake it on a sheet of parchment paper which all but eliminated the need for any cleanup. It was simple, easy to cook, reasonably quick, and the bread tasted great. We had a winner.

Fantastic enties in the Dutch Oven cook-off at MR13.

Since then I’ve cooked the same French bread recipe a couple of more times, including at Mountain Rendezvous where I actually cooked two loaves back-to-back for the first time. We didn’t win any of the prizes (nor were we going to with the top 3 going to much more involved dishes that really deserved it) but I was flooded with compliments anyway.

One other adjustment I made along the way was to the lid lifter I’d purchased. Frustratingly, it was just a bit too wide to fit inside my Dutch Oven when transporting it. A few careful love taps from my 3lb sledge corrected that. Why they didn’t make it just a touch narrower in the first place is beyond me.

So I’m just starting down the road with my Dutch Oven experiences. I’d like to try making pizza, and a chili too. Those first learning experiences will be important as I move forward. I think the key thing I learned was the mental adjustments I needed to make regarding the DO. I need to trust my own cooking instincts there, and understand the DO for what it is, as well as what it is not. And it’s not a magical pot that you can just dump bad ingredients into and have them come out as some wonder dessert.

And if you have a favforite recipe, I’d love to hear about it.