[Sca-cooks] trivets and dutch ovens

[Nancy Kiel]

I cooked in both camp ovens and a brick wall oven.  Oddly enough, I seemed to need to protect the top of what I was baking, either by covering it with paper in the wall oven or putting very few coals on top of the camp ovens.  However, cooking out of doors I do seem to burn the bottoms of things more than I remember doing at work.  Perhaps I'm overcompensating for the need to heat the "floor" underneath the oven--it appears that brick takes more to heat than dirt!  More research is required.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Stefan li Rous<mailto:StefanliRous at austin.rr.com> 
  To: SCA-Cooks maillist SCA-Cooks<mailto:SCA-Cooks at ansteorra.org> 
  Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 6:38 PM
  Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] trivets and dutch ovens


    Nancy Kiel replied to me with:
  > I was able to cook for 4 years at Colonial Williamsburg without using a
  > trivet in the ovens.  Of course, it is nice to have an actual hearth to
  > cook on, and maybe that makes the difference between needing and not
  > needing a trivet.

  Yes, but there is a major difference between the stone ovens you were 
  using and a metal dutch oven over and under hot coals. You are talking 
  about using a single chamber rock or brick oven, right? Or are you 
  talking about using a dutch oven in a hearth? If the latter, you may 
  have just been able to control the heat better. If you are talking 
  about using a mass oven, the following applies.

  With the dutch oven you are continuing to apply heat to the metal, 
  which will conduct it quite nicely to anything touching it inside, 
  which in our case, meant the bottom of the turnovers. In your case, the 
  temperature will be at its hottest when you first put the food in the 
  oven and from then on it will continue to go down. The more mass in the 
  oven, the slower the temperature will drop. But it isn't going to get 
  hotter. The temperature in the mass oven is also likely to be much more 
  evenly applied. In the dutch oven you can very likely have some hot 
  spots. The air space below the food helps even this out.

  Stefan
  --------
  THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
      Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          
  StefanliRous at austin.rr.com<mailto:StefanliRous at austin.rr.com>
  **** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org<http://www.florilegium.org/> ****

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