The same sort of Dutch ovens are also made in thick-walled cast aluminum. Works almost as well, and lots lighter.
I knew a guy who would take his aluminum oven on backpacking trips. We never tried to talk him out of it. (-:
(BTW, if you’re backpacking, you can make perfectly serviceable baked apples with that same recipe by just wrapping them in foil and sitting them directly in the coals. No oven needed.)
Yup… my local army surplus carries a full line of lodge cast iron, tiny 2 inch pans to giant pots that feed a troop, and also the hanging frames and other accessories.
The 6 1/2 inch skillet looks useless, but I get a lot of use from mine cooking up to three eggs. I also scrape down the interior with a steel spatula to greatly smooth the finish before reseasoning them.
They are handy. The year I moved into my current house we had an ice storm that knocked out electricity for 3 days. I wasn’t concerned though; I had a wood fireplace, gas hot water and plenty of wood. Roasted a great chicken while heating the house.
What does concern me is that BoingBoing participates in the Amazon Affiliates program without proper disclosure, This generates income for them at the expense of us Happy Mutants.
The solution is: when Jason, Cory, Xeni, et. al. post an irresistible link, I just strip out the affiliate code from the URL.
There is a line in Joshua Slocum’s “Sailing Alone Around The World” (1900) where he talks about getting a craving for bread somewhere down around Tierra Del Fuego. However, there are no towns and the natives are notoriously brutal, so he makes some sourdough and kindles a fire in a bucket to bake the bread. That’s all he says about it, but he started life at sea as a cook’s assistant, so no doubt he knew what he was doing. But I just thought, baking a loaf of bread in a bucket on a small wooden boat at sea sounds like the most totally bad-ass loaf of bread ever.
I don’t mind affiliate links. It’s the price of reading and participating for free. What I do mind is that it was other BB readers who clued me in to the fact that if you click on their link, even if you don’t buy the item, anything you do buy at Amazon for a set period of time (24 hours, I think) is credited to them, and I believe they actually see the info of who you are and what you bought. THAT, I have a problem with.
For organised family types, that is undoubtedly a great camping accessory. For drunk/high idiots who are camping, this is easily the best camping accessory:
As long as you’re sober enough to have bread, cheese (and hopefully other stuff) and not fall in a fire, this thing provides salty, oily stomach-lining of the highest quality and convenience.
Oh hell yes, those are great. They are available in cast iron or aluminum if weight is a factor. A nice cheese and sausage sammich on greasy toasted bread!
We know that? I didn’t recall from when it was first published, that the article reached that conclusion, so I read it again. I was right. The only conclusion it reached was that if you strip down a piece of cast iron cookware, and take the time to properly season it, it works quite well. No real surprise there. They could have done the same thing to a brand new piece of Lodge, and it also would have worked quite well.
The smaller “pie irons” are good for deserts. You can find a tin of cherry or blueberry pie filling at any country store and let the kids make fruit pies as a nice change from S’mores.