My wife proposed that I just use my big campfire Dutch oven and the fire in the furnace.
Evaporated milk biscuits, rather than the famous powder milk ones.
Cast iron in the fire.
Biscuits and fried ham.
Cowboy Cooking
Since the power is out, I made cowboy coffee this morning. I had meant to put the ham in the refrigerator this morning, but that should stay closed, so we decided to reshuffle the menu a bit and eat it now. The propane range will light with no power, but I wanted to bake some sort of bread. The oven is electric.
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We got pretty good at baking in a Dutch oven over a campfire. It works great. We made a good apple pie once using frozen puff pastry, the kind you can buy in any grocery store.
Until we did that I had no idea why cast-iron Dutch ovens have a rim around the lid: to hold the coals.
We spent hours yesterday trying to cover tender crops and especially citrus trees with tarps, old sheets, and plastic wrap. I knew we'd be lucky if much of it stood up to the 12 hours of 30-45-mph winds. We batted about 500, which probably means the citrus trees will recover, and some of the eggplants and tomatoes will sprout back from the roots and get a jump on spring. The lettuce and cooking greens may actually survive, at least in part. Otherwise almost everything that can be killed by a hard freeze already died in the bad freeze in Feb. 2021, so I'm confident anything that dies back this week will recover from the roots in the spring. And then of course there are the things in pots that Greg dragged into the garage, most of which should be fine.--Also, we haven't lost power.
If you want to make dough from scratch (probably not puff pastry, which is a ton of work to do from scratch, though there’s a good recipe with step by step folding instructions in the King Arthur brand flour baking cookbook), evaporated milk is a good choice for Dutch ovens. It’s richer with milk fats per volume than regular milk, which gives baked goods a creamier taste and also provides more resilience to the heat of a real fire.
This was canoe-trip cooking, in which everything needs to be pretty darn easy, hence the store-bought pastry. I wouldn't want to try rolling out dough on a sand bank and a little fold-up lap table.
It was definitely a proof-of-concept for the baking action. Any bread, pie, or cake product that will fit in the Dutch oven will come out fine. I was surprised by how well it worked even over a modest campfire on a beach or river's edge.
Grim,
Your set up is the same as ours- propane cooktop with electric oven. Woodstove for alternative heat.
What sort of furnace did you use- was it the wood heating stove?
I have considered replacing the electric oven with a propane one, but many have electric valves and need juice to run-although probably a very low current draw for the valves, nothing like a full on electric oven-so a small generator would perhaps suffice. We use one to run the boiler fan and pumps anyway, when the street power goes out.
I rarely lust after things, but that dutch oven is a wonderful item!!
I shall keep an eye out at the second hand stores.
Raven,
Yes, that’s right, I used the wood furnace in the basement/garage. I pushed the fire to the back, took one scoop of hot coals to lay below the Dutch oven, two more atop its lid, and then let it bake. It works best if you turn the oven 180 degrees halfway through the baking time, as the fire at the back of the furnace provides extra heat on one side.
When you’re done, you can build the furnace fire back up.
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