[Stoves] Stoves Digest, Vol 52, Issue 11

[neiltm at uwclub.net]

On 11 Dec 2014 at 12:00, stoves-request at lists.bioenergylists.org wrote:

> Traditionally in UK bread was baked by indirect heat, typically in
> bread ovens which were first fired with bundles of twigs and then once
> the brickwork was hot enough the ashes were raked out and the loaves
> sealed into the hot oven until cooked by the residual heat. 

Or pushed to one side once pyrolysis was complete as a continuing source 
of heat from the char, and the oven admitting just enough air to sustain 
it.  A lower heat retaining body mass can be utilised then.

> I take it
> this is the same as your "high mass stove" method? Latterly the oven
> became a metal box around which the flue gases flowed and nowadays
> steam is used. So I'm not surprised there is some particulate
> contamination when fired directly in the flue gases, though it is
> gratifying to note that this is not such a problem with TLUD which has
> lower particulates.

Inspired more by Ray Mears baking bread in a 'Dutch Oven' over an open 
fire, but not so impressed by the obviously very charred bottom of the 
loaf that emerged, I placed my 'Kubex' circa 1960s camp oven consisting 
of a galvanised single skin box with two shelves and a baffled hole in 
the base, over the 'woodgas campstove XL' on low fan setting.  The dough 
rose in a pyrex with lid, mimicking the enclosed Dutch oven to exclude 
contact with the emissions, and a very satisfactory unburned loaf 
resulted without refuelling the XL.

My Great Aunt when living 'off grid' as we now say, in rural Shropshire 
England in the 1950's used a similar oven with mica window in the door on 
top of a paraffin circular wick stove that burned with a blue flame with 
a short chimney ending in the hob (a bit like the 'Champion').  She baked 
cakes in it, and all sorts. Fascinated me as a small boy, and she kept 
them for power cuts later in her life, and I now own them.  So a box 
internally flued can work well too.

As a young boy scout I learned by watching, how to cook a leg of pork on 
an open fire, enough to feed 8 to 12.  Underneath a canvas roof with no 
sides or ends, the breakfast fire became a bed of hot char on which a 
baking tray with the larded and salted pork was placed, and a galvanised 
bath tub inverted over it and sealed with raked ashes and char, while a 
separate fire was made and transported on a shovel to the windward side 
and top of the bath tub.  Everyone got to listen to the pork sizzling by 
removing a corner pole of the cook house shelter, and this was our 
'temperature guage', placing the metal spike on the tub and the other end 
in the ear.  After 4 years of annual scout camps and by then probably a 
patrol leader, you were adequately trained to bring a large properly 
cooked through pork roast with crackling to the trestle tables in the 
marquee at more or less the same time as the other 5 patrols doing the 
same!  Inspired I'm sure by ways used in the military, and taught with 
amazing efficiency in this way.  Not so fuel efficient though I guess!

Hope that little diversion was acceptable.

Best wishes,   Neil Taylor