Baking with a wood stove

8/1/2013

Memorandum for the Record on the Coleman Camp Oven

       Yesterday I made some biscuits using the oven and the local made for Mexico wood stove. And the oven worked. As to a description, imagine your own oven without any insulation around it.  This oven takes RV sized cooking implements, which the Hemlocks has.

            Here's the details as it was a onetime experiment.  Usually I make biscuits in the electric oven.

            First the compromises. I used store bought biscuits so I could focus on the baking of them. And I used charcoal vise wood as the stove's heat source. Now I have used, in the past, local wood, pine cones, and a high quality anthracite coal as other sources of heat. And they worked fine, too.

            Second the report. The stove, which I last used one like it in California about a half century ago, did not heat up hot enough for the recommended recipe. So I just took a longer time at a lower temperature, kept an eye on it, and the biscuits turned out very well. I was pleased. Now placement may have had something to do with it, and I did keep a thermocouple powered fan running right by it. In other words, I probably could have made the oven hotter.

            Lessons learned.

                        1) This fold-out oven works OK. Any camping oven like it should do just as well. The Hemlocks has three of them these days.

                        2) I choose not to get a wood cooking stove as a result, and will just use the present wood stoves with the Coleman Camp Ovens on top as a substitute.

                        3) Baking will happen, but probably not like what we do today in good times. Mostly I assume after wheat flour runs out in some kinds of hard times situations, collecting and making acorn flour like the American Indians did will not be very popular as it takes a lot of time and effort. Now I have made acorn coffee from local acorns I collected, and it was pretty good.

                        4)  Right now one camping oven is intended to be used with a wood stove at whatever overflow area the Hemlocks uses...probably the Cliff Field Pond shelter. It could be part of the barn area, too. The thought is the closeness to Monterey may bring in refugees, like within a mile or so, and if times get hard, how do we handle it.

                        5) From growing up with a wood powered cooking stove in the kitchen, it was pretty hot in the room during the warm season. So plan on that.  But, I have even been hotter when working in a fire room on a Navy ship back when they had boilers to provide power. Anyway, anytime one uses stoves in a room, expect things to get hot.