Cooking in a wood-burning stove

[Maykal]

Hi Demi,

How well does your kitchen oven heat the room after you've stopped putting wood in it? Does the temperature of the room drop quickly or does it keep giving out heat all night?

Mike

[genie]

I enjoy cooking risottos. The main thing we make on our stove (villager puffin) is a big pot of chai. Sometimes we use the yogi loose teas (classic, himalayan, choco and good morning chai) sometimes we make it up..

7 parts crushed (not ground) cinnamon sticks

then we play around with the other ingredients which include

Cloves,
ginger
whole black pepper corns
cardomon (easy on the cardamon - an easy way to ruin the tea!)
Star anise
coriander seed etc etc
you can pretty much explore any combination of whole and crushed spices.
Boil water, then add maybe 5 teaspoons of chai mix to every 3 liters of water.
put on top of stove to stew. you dont want it boiling, simmering from time to time at the most.
When its ready its a wonderful syrupy pink colour. Add sugar (very important! sugar and spice - sugar brings out the flavours!!) and choice of milk (i prefer moo milk!) If we take from the pot we replace with water and carry on doing it until it no longer tastes. It lasts us days and we also bottle it up and put it in the fridge. It also keeps the colds at bay! a wonderful tasty caffine free winter drink!

(Also adding any of the above spices to a rice pudding!)! mmmmmmmm!

[demi]

Hi Demi,

How well does your kitchen oven heat the room after you've stopped putting wood in it? Does the temperature of the room drop quickly or does it keep giving out heat all night?

Mike

We stuff it with a huge log on top of lots of hot coals and some smaller logs when we go to bed, usually between 10-11pm, and it burns till around 4-5am and if we are up then there is still sufficient coal left to re start the fire. If we get up after 6am there's no coal left, but the room is still above 15 degrees. When it's really cold and we sleep in the livingroom and maintain the fire during the night, waking up at around 3am to stuff the fire again because it can get down to -30 outside at night which means you have to use more wood as the temperature can drop quickly when the fire dies down. But the wood burner is very efficient at heating the room, far superior to electric radiators, once the fire's going the room gets really hot and we have to open the doors. And our kitchen and livingroom is open plan so it's heating a big room.

[Esme]

Long time since I've been on here, I keep forgetting about the site since I don't tend to use my pc. Sorry.
I have two stoves, an old range in the kitchen which I put in myself (all the bits of it were in the shed when I moved in so it wasn't such an impressive feat as it may sound) and my Beloved has just replaced the open fire in the living room for a Godin pipe stove which is about half the height and the same shape as an old fashioned letter box.
I use the kitchen range for baking (top oven) and the big, lower oven can be used as the most wonderful slow cooker overnight. I sometimes put a kettle or pan straight onto the fire part of the range but not that often.
The Godin hasn't been in long, and so far all I've done is boil a kettle or a pot of soup or stew on top.
I have two parrots who are in the front room and so I use the Godin more at the moment to ensure that they are warm enough. intend to make pancakes and drop scones on it at some point.
However I am very, very lucky in that I live next to a field which has a skip in it belonging to a fencing contractor. He puts waste wood in it which is free to collect, so I can afford to put the kitchen range on as well if I want hot water (it has a back boiler) or wish to use the oven.
Either stove makes rising yeast doughs easy peasy. I can't imagine living in a town now, without the options I have.

[Maykal]

We stuff it with a huge log on top of lots of hot coals and some smaller logs when we go to bed, usually between 10-11pm, and it burns till around 4-5am and if we are up then there is still sufficient coal left to re start the fire. If we get up after 6am there's no coal left, but the room is still above 15 degrees. When it's really cold and we sleep in the livingroom and maintain the fire during the night, waking up at around 3am to stuff the fire again because it can get down to -30 outside at night which means you have to use more wood as the temperature can drop quickly when the fire dies down. But the wood burner is very efficient at heating the room, far superior to electric radiators, once the fire's going the room gets really hot and we have to open the doors. And our kitchen and livingroom is open plan so it's heating a big room.

The wood burner/cooker in the kitchen looks much like yours. The problem I have is that the kitchen only has a door to the outside (this seems typical in these Saxon farmhouses as all the other houses I've seen are the same, unless someone has converted an upstairs room into a kitchen) so every time someone comes in or out you lose the heat. It heats up quickly to about 18-20C, but also cools down very quickly. Not really a big problem as we're generally only in there to cook and eat, and then we go upstairs.

Upstairs, in the bedroom, we have a terracotta stove, which is much MUCH more efficient. Last time I was there, the bedroom was 1C when I arrived and it heated it up to 29C in about 4 hours, after which I stopped adding wood. That was about 9pm. In the morning when I got up, about 5am, it was still 23C, and even in the late afternoon it was still 'warmish' there, about 17-18C.

I saw some nice-looking terracotta cooking stoves. A little pricey, about 500-600 euro for an average-sized one, but I'm thinking that they could be worth it when I've living there full time as you could fire it up and warm the kitchen up in the morning and it'll be warm all day. Have you ever tried one of those?

Mike

[demi]

Mike,

Do you mean a stove made entirely from terracotta, or one that has some terracotta bricks inside to keep the heat?
My husband has told me our wood cooker has some terracotta inside. It's insulated i imagine round the oven and the sides and most of the heat comes out the top hot plate but the sides stay warm after the fire's gone out.

I checked the temperature last night it was 25 degrees in the living room when we went to bed and the last logs went in at around 8pm, it was really hot in the room. This morning when we got up at 7am it was 19 degrees. 8 degrees in the unheated bedroom, and i think its about -6 at night outside. And the full pot of water i leave on the stove was still hot this morning, i use the pot i use for a water bath for sterilizing jars, it's huge with a lid and keeps the heat all night.

Have you got a link for the terracotta stoves you're looking at?

[Maykal]

Hi Demi,

The ones I'm thinking of are made completely of terracotta bricks and tiles, with iron fittings (doors, grate, etc). They take a bit longer to heat up but are fantastic as retaining the heat for long periods of time. Even 8 hours after the last log you can't touch the sides (so maybe not ideal for unsupervised kids?) I don't think my kitchen oven has any kind of tiles or bricks in it, which is probably why it cools down so quickly, but I don't think it was every meant to operate as a heater too.

Here are a couple of example of the terracotta cookers. They use the same hotplates as the metal cookers. Some are free-standing portable ones, others are constructed on the spot.

Here's a fixed one:

http://www.amrita.ro/admin/termekkepek/1691kalhyak.JPG

Here's a 'portable' one (weighs about 300kg so portable only in the sense that it can be moved if you really REALLY wanted):

http://www.teracota.ro/noutati/soba_iza.jpg

The top one would probably cost about 1000 Euro including all the materials, transport, construction, and so on. The bottom pre-fab one is about 300 Euro I think.

Mike

[demi]

I like the look of the first one that's built in. Might consider making one, well for my husband to make one, when we do up the farm house. Could probably salvage a lot of the material for free and do it ourselves.
I don't think i'v seen them here. But if they have them in Romania they probably have similar ones here. They defiantly have ones with terracotta parts inside to hold the heat though.

[Bulworthyproject]

We just wanted to say thank you to Jeremy for starting this thread. We've been talking about doing Jacket potatoes in the woodburner for ages but had not got around to trying it. Our oven was broken a couple of years ago moving it from one caravan to another and as a result we do our Sunday roast on the barbecue each week with the lid down and the charcoal on the opposite side from the roasting dish. It works well for roasting, but it's a lot of hassle for jacket spuds.

We did some spuds in the woodburner the other day and they were great. Properly cooked in the middle and crispy but not burned on the outside. Fantastic!!!!