Anything you can fry, bake or boil can be made in a Dutch Oven. The biggest advantage is a little slower pace, so while dinner is cooking, visit with family and friends and make your meal an event instead of a hurried chow hall experience. A few sacks of briquettes and a couple of Dutch Ovens and you not only have a great camping meal, but you have dinner for family night, dinner when the power goes out, dinner in an emergency situation. Take the lid off and turn it upside down and you have a griddle for your eggs and bacon. Don’t want to use briquettes tonight? Use your Dutch Oven in your home oven, just as yummy.

Dutch Ovens are made of heavy cast iron, with a heavy lid they act a lot like a pressure cooker, cutting down cooking time. Dutch Ovens used to need to be carefully seasoned when you first purchased them. Now days they come preseasoned and with a good wash they can be used right away. I’m not sure I trust that all together. I still take my cast iron pots and pans and give them a really great wash with hot soapy water, then put them on the stove top or in the oven and heat them to very hot. After they have cooled I take a paper towel with a small amount of oil on it and give the pot a good rub down inside and out, don’t leave oil in the pot, wipe it as dry as you can so the oil won’t become rancid. Don’t forget to coat the inside of the lid too. This effort will pay off in the days ahead as it prevents rust and keeps it looking great. A Dutch Oven that is well taken care of can last generations.

Even if your oven has become rusted or rancid or a small amount of pitting has occured because of improper care, wash, scrub, heat, oil, elbow grease, you start from the beginning and do the work and you will be able to save all but the most forlorn pot.

You can get Dutch Ovens from very small, about 8 inches to very large, about 14 inches. You can also get turkey bakers, corn bread makers, frying pans, there is a lot of variety. If you’re new or you don’t do a lot of Dutch Oven cooking, then stick with a 12 or 14 inch, it’s the most common and will serve almost all your needs very well. It’s also a good idea to have a hook for lifting the lids of the pots. You can get fancy and expensive or not. My son made everyone in the family a hook from rebar in his metal works high school class one year. It continues to be the best one we’ve ever used.

I’ve seen fancy brick built Dutch Oven Pit, I’ve seen a stack of Dutch Ovens and a volcano burner, I’ve seen my father in law stack up ovens in his wheel barrow. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, the only thing that matters to a Dutch Oven is heat, get that right and you good to go. So don’t spend tons of money thinking its the only way to do it, concentrate on the heat source. Briquettes are the best heat source and easy to use. Light them in a stack and when they are hot and ready to go you’ll need roughly 16-18 for the bottom of a 14 inch oven with 12 more for the top, this keeps your oven at roughly 350 degrees. If you’re using more than one oven you can stack them with the layer of briquettes between each one. This saves on briquettes and space needed for cooking. It’s very efficient. Just remember the basics of fire safety and common sense.

Lifting the lid to check cools the ovens and prolongs cooking times just like opening your kitchen oven door, so do it only when needed. If you figure on the 350 degrees, you should be able to time your recipes closely to the kitchen oven times. When you need to turn what you’re cooking, do it as quickly as possible. My in-laws and my husband and I work as a team when cooking with the Dutch Ovens, you often need more than 2 hands.

You can cook anything from bread, to stew, to meat loaf, to the famous Dutch Oven Chicken in your ovens. Don’t be afraid to try, don’t be afraid to clean them, spend a little extra time cooking Dutch!