Cooking in a wood-burning stove

[JeremyinCzechRep]

I have a wood-burning stove in my living room and it heats my living room wonderfully and does a feeble job of trying to heat the rest of the house. I have started putting potatoes wrapped in foil into the stove and the resulting baked potatoes are MUCH nicer than those cooked in the oven (and no money goes to Mr Abramovich). I am also a fan of baked apples and I'm going to try them tonight. Does anyone else cook stuff inside their stoves? If so, what?

[Crickleymal]

I've boiled a kettle on top of mine although it did take some time.

[Maykal]

Can you only cook inside it? I suppose so as it's for the living room. The one I have in my kitchen has a cast iron top you can cook on. It's great for traditional stews, soups, 'peasant style' potatoes (basically sautéed spuds with onion, bacon and paprika) and you can also remove some rings from the centre of the cast iron top and sit a cauldron in there and cook mamaliga (polenta).

You could try making a well-sealed multi-layered bag of tin foil with pork, apple, sage and onion and maybe a splash of white wine and sticking it in there for 30-45 minutes (or whatever, depends how hot it is, play it by ear). Kind of stew in a bag.

Also, I quite like roast quince as an alternative to apple. Have you tried stuffing the cored apples with sweet cheese and raisins and baking them? Very yummy.

[MarcherLady]

Ooh, I want to do this, how long did they take? Same as in an oven or longer? - And was the burner already hot or did you put them in as you lit it? I guess it all comes down to how hot the burner is... Hmm, I think I'm going to have to try this at the weekend - why have I never thought of this!

[demi]

I also have a woodburning cooker in my kitchen/livingroom which heats the room and i cook nearly everything on it so i don't have to use the electric cooker. I imagine it's similar to Maykal's. It's just over a meter long and just under a meter wide with a cast iron top hot plate and and oven underneath next to the fire bit. The smoke passes from the fire, through the oven bit and out into the flu on the other side. I think i can find a pic online....http://www.elbraco.rs/92/Grejanje/Cvrst ... KREM-L.htm That's our one.

You need to get it really hot to use the oven by stuffing it with smaller bits of wood, and it doesn't bake cakes well. The oven works beast for cooking thin things like pizza or pastry, roast veg or re-heating things and not good for thick things like roast chicken or other meat. You also have to turn the food as its hotter on the fire side. The top is good for everything you would normally cook on top of the stove and you can adjust the temperature as it's hottest directly above the fire and cooler on the other side above the oven. I love it and it heats the room very well, when im cooking i open the doors to heat the rest of the house as it gets too hot in the living room when im cooking. It's also the only heating we use in the house.

[GeorgeSalt]

I have tried cooking in the woodburner, but it's a little hot and I need to push the fire to one side to make room. It's much easier too cook on top of the stove. I like to cook stews on it, and give them a real slow cook for several hours.

My basic recipe is (for two people)
Meat - 12oz venison or beef or lamb, or two lamb shanks, or a jointed pheasant, or chicken thighs/joints
1 glass wine (homebrewed for preference), or a bottle of beer
1 glass water (omit if using beer instead of wine)
1 chopped onion (plus garlic to taste)
2 portions chopped root veg - carrot, parsnip
1 teaspoon mustard

Dust the meat in seasoned flour and fry off in the pan on the hob (regular stove) until browned (the flour helps thicken the gravy). Remove the meat and reserve.
Fry off the onion until soft. Add the root veg and gently fry for a couple of minutes.
Add the wine and deglaze the pot.
Return the meat to the pan and add the water.
Put the lid on the pan and place on the woodburner for 3-6 hours.

You can add a can of butter beans about half-an-hour before serving if you want a complete one pot meal.

[JeremyinCzechRep]

Mine is something like the ones at the top in this advert: http://www.produkte24.com/cy/bauhaus-oesterreich-966/bauhaus-werbebeilage-gueltig-vom-28-08-2007-29-09-2007-10847/seite-3-gross.html so not much scope for cooking on top. I try to put the potatoes in once the fire has produced some hot ash and put the potatoes in the hot ash rather than near the burning logs. I'm still wary of cooking raw meat but love the taste of precooked meat (such as a chicken leg) cooked in foil in the fire.

[Thomzo]

you can also remove some rings from the centre of the cast iron top and sit a cauldron in there

I cook quite a lot on top of my stove and I've only just realised that I could do this too. Cooking in a pot on top of the stove is quite slow (although the food is often better for it) but placing the pot straight over the fire would be more efficient. Providing I don't get too much smoke out around the edge. I shall have to try this at the weekend.

Zoe

[Maykal]

I cook quite a lot on top of my stove and I've only just realised that I could do this too. Cooking in a pot on top of the stove is quite slow (although the food is often better for it) but placing the pot straight over the fire would be more efficient. Providing I don't get too much smoke out around the edge. I shall have to try this at the weekend.

Here they use a round-bottomed cast-iron cauldron called a 'ceaun' which fits snuggly into the hole whatever size the hole it so no smoke escapes. There's a bit expensive but last a lifetime (or sometimes more!)

[demi]

Is that what the rings on top are for? We use it to fit really big logs in which wont go in the door.

[Zech]

I thought I'd be able to cook on top of mine, but as it's heating the rest of the house, it has water pipes running through and they take so much heat out that the top doesn't get that hot at all. I use it as a warm place for thing like bread dough, though I have to be careful not to put them too close to the flue, which really is hot!

I've tried cooking little pies inside, using a toasted sandwich pan (http://www.thediablo.com/) but I wasn't very good at finding the right temperature in the fire, so I kept burning them.

[KGB]

We have two woodburning stoves. We use one in the living room and it has a ring on top for big pans of stew. We have a proper wood oven in the kitchen which we can and do use for everything. You can get a thermometer so you can see what the oven temperature is. It does take a bit more working out than an electric oven but we have baked cakes and puddings and roasted ducks and chickens. They do need watching and turning because, as one poster says,"it's hotter on the fire side".

[Maykal]

Is that what the rings on top are for? We use it to fit really big logs in which wont go in the door.

Yes, I imagine so, if it's the same as the ones we have here. Here's what the iron plate looks like on mine:

http://images5.okr.ro/auctions.v3/700_700/2011/06/11/7/5/673452941105703057456125-3732341-700_700.jpg

There are three pieces of the ring that can be removed, depending on how large you want the hole. taking the middle one out is more for getting more direct heat onto a flat-bottomed pan to bring water to the boil I think. If you take out all of them, the hole is about 16-17cm and a round-bottomed pan will sit snuggly in it, block the smoke, and get lots of direct heat. My oven has two of these plates - one directly over the fire, and one to the side (which is useful when you just want your stew simmering away).

[The Riff-Raff Element]

We cook using ours a lot during the winter (especially on days like to today when our electricity package means if we used the oven we'd pay 51 cents per kWh ). Learning to cook bread in it took time, but I'm getting good results now. The very best thing on it, though, is omelettes. I don't know why, but the texture is far superior to anything we can do on the gas.

[demi]

Is that what the rings on top are for? We use it to fit really big logs in which wont go in the door.

Yes, I imagine so, if it's the same as the ones we have here. Here's what the iron plate looks like on mine:

http://images5.okr.ro/auctions.v3/700_700/2011/06/11/7/5/673452941105703057456125-3732341-700_700.jpg

There are three pieces of the ring that can be removed, depending on how large you want the hole. taking the middle one out is more for getting more direct heat onto a flat-bottomed pan to bring water to the boil I think. If you take out all of them, the hole is about 16-17cm and a round-bottomed pan will sit snuggly in it, block the smoke, and get lots of direct heat. My oven has two of these plates - one directly over the fire, and one to the side (which is useful when you just want your stew simmering away).

Well that makes much more sense. i'v been stuffing the fire every time to cook on it to get it hot enough when i could of been taking the plates out to get direct heat from the fire. I will try it for breakfast in the morning!
Yes my stove is like a double hotplate with the removable rings over the fire and just a plain hotplate over the oven side. I love it, it heats the living room and when it gets too hot in here, usually when im cooking, we open the doors to heat through to the bedroom. We don't have other heating in the house ( well we do have other stoves in the bedrooms but don't use them ) and we've been sleeping in the bedroom with no heating all winter so far, although it's been really mild here this winter. It did get down to -15 for a couple of weeks in December though, and we had to all sleep in the living room for a while. We also keep a massive pot full of water with a lid pretty much constantly on top of the stove so we've always got hot water to bath the kids and wash the dishes with, and during the night when the fire goes out the water holds the heat for longer and acts like a radiator.