Stacking ovens

[Delmonico]

Stacking dutch ovens

After years of teaching people to use dutch ovens and demonstrating their use, the one thing that still seems to amaze me, is how many people, before they even get cooking in just one mastered, want to start stacking them.   This amazes me, but if you do a lot of searching around the Internet you will find people stacking oven 4 and 5 high and taking selfies of themselves with their ovens, or having someone else take their picture and posting it on the internet, this is the worst reason to stack them, but it seems to be the main motive for it.

As I have already said, learn to cook well in your ovens before you stack them, be able to control the heat in 3-4 ovens sitting on their own first.   Then take a serious look at if you really need to stack them or if you just want to stack them.   There is one reason and only one reason that I will stack ovens and that is because I don?t have enough coals to give each oven the amount it needs to stand on its own.  This may be because of a shortage of good firewood or sometimes I just have not generated enough coals in my fires, a problem that can happen with a lot of ovens.   Although I cook with wood coals, the basics of this also hold true with charcoal.   Charcoal cooks may be more tempted to stack because of the cost of bagged charcoal, but ruining an oven full of food often costs more than the charcoal would to cook it on its own.

Stacking ovens is more complicated than it looks, most (but not all) dutch oven cooking uses a ratio of 1/4th to 1/3rd of the coals on the bottom of the oven, many items will burn on the bottom if you add more, some cooking requires no coals on the bottom (such as roasting meat) some cooking needs coals on just the bottom (such as boiling or stewing where there is a lot of liquid that needs to be heated from the bottom and any on top are mostly wasted).   

Also, besides the top oven getting more heat on the bottom than needed, you must factor in another item; the oven on top reflects the heat from its bottom and into the lid on the oven below it, so now we are putting more heat than may be needed into that one from the top.  One can see this gets to be a bit more complicated than a new person to cooking this way may want to take on till their skill level improves.   

Another problem that arises from stacking ovens is one has to remove any oven or ovens on top to check one on the bottom, this can make the workload for the cook heavier, something I don?t like to do if not needed, so we need to make sure the oven below doesn?t need checked very often.   

Another item to consider once you work out the problems is that going over two ovens high greatly increases the risk of tipping oven one or more of the upper ovens, at best this will spill your food out on the ground, it could crack a hot oven and it could cause someone to get burned.  This can be caused by moving them to or from the stack or soft ground giving way under one side of the oven, tipping the whole stack.

So how do you know when you can stack ovens and when you should not?   Well to be honest, it is something you have to figure out for yourself at the time, experience is the best teacher, to begin with, I never stack anything that has no liquid in it such as breadstuffs on top, biscuits, cornbread and yeast breads, you are just asking for trouble.   Now one item I often put on top if the top coals are not to heavy is a cobbler, but only those made of canned fruit, the fruit is already cooked and one just needs to warm it up enough to be hot and to make the cornstarch or flour thicken the juices, after about 5 minutes I remove it from the top and set it on a warm, dry spot and let the crust bake from the top heat.   

A dish with a lot of liquid in it is best to put on top, rice and pasta are ones that come to mind as well as anything else such as vegetables that need boiled using a higher heat, the bottom oven needs to be one that can have a fairly high heat into the top, breads such as biscuits,  or many other breads such as cobbler or even a pie, the amount of coals may need reduced a bit to keep it from getting to hot, but once again experience is the best teacher.   Another one that works well on top is when you are frying something in a dutch oven or searing meat, both situations where you want a lot of bottom heat.

One option I use a lot is I have some heavy trivets that I put on top of a dutch oven and then this allows me to put a coffee pot or a sauce pan on top.  I sometimes do go three high this way if needed because there is far less weight on top of the second oven and there are no coals on top to drop into the tops of my boots.

In short, when to stack and how to stack is really up to the cook and the situation at hand, one really wants to use this method when it is needed and not just to show off, as I mentioned in the text, mistakes can cause a meal to burn easier than not stacking ovens and the safety concerns need to also be a factor, severe burns to the cook or helpers and even worse, to by-standers will ruin an event very quickly.