I know I’ve said this before, but it never hurts to repeat an important idea. When it comes to SHTF scenarios, I realize the likelihood scale runs from personal possibilities to  planet-level possibilities. I believe that the more likely bad times are going to be closer to home – illness, loss of a job, catastrophic injury, death, etc. The less likely a possibility, the more people and/or area affected.

The worst thing that has affected me was sitting at home while a hurricane made landfall a little over a mile away from me. Twice. Having gone through a ground-zero event like that makes you look at things in a new light. While we managed better than most, looking back, I see many things that would have made our down time easier to deal with.

One of the gaps in our preps was cooking options. Open fires WILL work, but how many of you have made biscuts from scratch over a campfire? Not me! And while I could probably be OK doing it, there are many things that could make it easier.

1. A grate for one thing. We now have that.
2. A source of fuel. We now have this in the form of a stack of firewood, and 40 lbs of charcoal (not to mention the 7 propane tanks for the grill we now have).
3. A pan MADE for open-fire cooking. This is what we are here for today.

A cast iron pan has one two things going against them that prevents many people from using them – rust and weight.

Properly seasoned, a cast iron pan will resit rust. With proper care and cleaning, and rust should be non-existent, particularly the longer you use it. Proper care also increases the “seasoning” of the steel, making it even more non-stick. I have an old cast iron pan that I can heat up, drop and egg on it with no oil, and flip it as though it were made of super-Teflon.

Weight cannot be changed, and its part of what makes it such a wonderful cooking option. The evenness of the heat for cooking is phenomenal. The heat retention is also a major player in its usefulness.

With a cast iron Dutch oven, you effectively have a portable oven for baking, broiling, deep frying, roasting, boiling, in fact, just about anything you can do on an electric range you can do with a cast iron Dutch oven, and do it when the power is out. With the model we have also flip the lid over and use the slightly concave inside surface as a frying pan to make pancakes and such. Not too shabby!

As seen in my previous DO posts, heat management is tricky, particularly when using firewood. I’ve found that  FAR better option for cooking is to use charcoal briquettes. They offer uniformity to the amount of heat the produce as well as the duration of that heat. When using Kingsford charcoal, each briquette used adds about 15 degrees of heat.

Lodge offers a chart to show the number of briquettes needed for each size DO in order to achieve the proper temperature. This takes ALL of the guesswork out of the temperature equation.This chart also increases your efficiency, as you know exactly how mach charcoal to use, saving you money.

Now, with this DO, we can do our cooking outside to keep the heat out of the kitchen. We can cook when or where there is no electricity, such as a three week power outage, or a camping trip. Now that we have one, I wonder why we didn’t get one sooner. I’ve seen BlueTang turn out some GREAT eats with his, so my food should at least come out edible, at least most times.

Having a DO as part of our preps has not only given us another level of security in the event we have a SHTF moment. And with the first mantra of a survival situation being “have a positive mental attitude (PMA)”, this adds peace of mind so that PMA is far more likely.

Add in the fact that it turns out some mighty fine food (when we manage the heat properly) and the wife and I enjoy cooking on it, and we have a solid “must-have” item.

The wife has informed me that I need to ask for DO recipes from my readers. So if you have a dutch oven recipe you are willing to share, please email me at db @ floridahillbilly.com with the recipe. If you’d like, I will add it to the site here. (Let me know if that is OK.) I’m looking to compile a list of all DO recipes we use, and this lets me get some tried and true recipes to attempt. No matter how long after this is posted, if you email me a recipe, I’ll add it in here, try it, and if its good, add it to my recipe list.

So go get a DO, and start cooking in your back yard.

db