Woodstove cooking questions ??

[Scrapman]

I don't currently cook on a wood stove , but one of my preps is a small; cast iron wood stove With two round removable holes for cooking ...
My question is do you remove the hole covers and set the pot directly over the open hole, letting the flames lick the bottom of the pan ...

.........Scrapman

 

[Deemy]

If I remember correctly, my grandfather had holes in his regular size cook stove. I remember him picking up an odd looking hook piece of metal and use it to pick up the hot metal disc, After picking up the round plate he would shove in wood through the hole.

 

[Norma]

Deemy you are right on that. On some stoves there is a small lid type thing you lift up and put in the corn cobs too.

Norma

 

[goatlady2]

No, you do not let flames "lick" the bottom of the pans. You do not really have a wood "cooking" stove as a wood cook stove has the fire box set off to the side of the stove, not directly under the "burners. That lid on you stove is to add wood or to act as an extra draft control by slightly tilting to a bit, but you usually get a smoky mess doing that unless you are real experienced. You will also find tht trying to cook you what you have will give you 1 range of cooking - BOILING! No simmer, no medium, no low, and really hard to fry eggs on high heat. You might want to set your stove up and practice on it NOW. Demmy - it's called strangely enough a lid lifter. I have 2 just in case and my burners on my 6 burner stove each has 3 rings to the lids for really fine adjustment of heat. My firebox is way over to the left side of the stove so only heat, no flame circulates, so I can remove lids or partial lids to adjust the direct heat.

 

[blue gecko]

You can use a cast iron trivet to lift your pan away from the heat for lower cooking temps. A double boiler can serve the same purpose. Sometimes you have to get a little creative with it! BG

 

[NC Susan]

the only reason you OPEN the round plugs is to let in air, which makes the internal fire HOTTER, and boils your water or grease faster by making your stove top HOTTER. Of course if you are cooking on the front burner, you would 'air' the back burner. (Some stoves also have internal DRAFTS)

You cook on a closed plug. Yes, Fire never touches your pans!!!

With experience you can learn your temperatures. I think another way to determine heat is to dribble water on the plug. Depending on how fast the water dances, is whether you can boil water or just warm up a baby bottle.

also: Critical for baking a cake, a meatloaf or a loaf of bread is to know how hot your oven is and you can do that by Dropping a spoon full of white flour on your oven floor. Depending on the amount of time it takes to burn the flour from white to brown is the extreme temperature range.

Practice and patience as each stove in each house with different styles of cooking pots and pans will be slightly different time frames.

 

[Charlie]

Respectfully disagree about the "lids" issue.....

Look at the stove at the top of this page. Note that the "burners" or holes are spread all over the cooking surface. And there are usually two right over the firebox as well. My wife and I cooked for over 15 years on a Monarch that looked a lot like the one pictured.

We DID use the open burners many times. Example, you have one skillet on the cooler side simmering something while boiling water for canning on a open burner. Why else would they put up to 6 of these removeable lids (different sizes for different pans) on a cook surface.

I grew up with many neighbors using wood cook stoves and ALL of them used open burners with direct flames or heat contacting the fry pans, etc. when they wanted fast heat.

Very often we had a copper boiler on top of the stove with two lids off so the maximum amount of heat could get to the bottom of it to keep the water boiling. They are removeable for a reason, and that reason is to allow maximum heat to get to the bottom of your skillets, boilers, etc.

A wood cookstove can be doing a whole bunch of things at once. Canning directly over the flame side, frying in the middle, while simmering on the cooler side. Bread rising in the warmer while baking in the oven. A pot of coffee warming off to the side, etc. Our monarch had two ornate drop down holders on the back of the stove that allowed you to put your pot of coffee off of the surface to just keep it warm. A wood stove allows you to do stuff you cannot do on a simple gas or electric stove. These "holes" have a reason to be there otherwise a single flat surface would suffice. We often did feed the stove from the top using the lids directly over the fire box. We also opened those lids while the fire was just starting to get a big pot of coffee off to a quick start in the morning while the fire was building. Doing that made coffee lickity split. Waiting for the iron to warm up would have added many minutes to such a simple task. The old timers taught us to not worry about a little carbon on the bottom of our utensils. Just wipe them off with water and hang them on hooks beside the stove. Dozens of my neighbors did this so I think those holes are there to be used as I have mentioned.

My wife loved the woodstove in the winter. However....summer was another story. So long as I kept her in fine split maple with some super dry cedar kindling, she could get a pot of coffee perking as fast as you could with a gas stove.