Dutch oven recipes: cooking and baking over a fire

You can’t carry a cast-iron Dutch oven far, but cooking with these heavy pans on a nearby fire pit is a real adventure. And if you’re travelling by van, you might be able to fit it in with your cookware.

There are a few things to bear in mind to ensure your food is cooked through but doesn’t get burnt. Here are some key tips and suitable recipes.

One-pot dishes are classic options, but a Dutch oven can do so much more – even bakes and roasts. When you turn the lid upside down on the fire, it functions like a kind of frying pan, and if you put the coals on and around the pan, it serves as an oven.

Don’t wait until your stomach’s growling before you start cooking! Cooking on a fire always calls for lots of time and patience, especially at the beginning: it takes a while for the Dutch oven to get up to temperature. Plus, preparing vegetables and meat, and sorting out everything else, probably takes more time than it would on your hob at home.

Cooking with a Dutch oven

The following tips will help ensure that cooking over a fire is a roaring success.

• Heat the pan on all the embers – when necessary.

• Push as many of the embers as you need for your dish to the edge of your fire pit.

• Start out with a small amount of embers: you can always add heat later, but it’s harder to take it away. That’s because the pan stores the heat, even if you push the embers aside.

• Use fireproof gloves to put the pan on the embers you’ve prepared.

• If you’re baking something, put the lid on and place about three times as many embers on the lid as are under the pan.

You can’t regulate the fire’s temperature precisely with the pan, so you can’t follow a recipe precisely: you need to try things out and improvise. In the video, Andy reveals a few tips so you can enjoy the taste of success.

Baking in a Dutch oven

Dutch ovens aren’t just for roasting meat, braising vegetables or frying desserts: when you put the lid on, these cast-iron pans work like an oven. With the right heat from above and below, plus a little practice, you’ll be able to bake sweet and savoury treats alike. Make sure there’s always much more heat from the top than the bottom – your dish will burn quickly underneath, and it’ll only get crisp on top if you use a lot of heat. As a rule of thumb, we recommend positioning the embers underneath and on top in a ratio of 1:3.

Fire-cooked recipes

You can cook almost anything over a fire, but stews work particularly well. Andy shares two recipes below: beef ragu with spelt pita and a crumble for dessert.