When cooking in ashes, it’s my opinion that the best thing to use is an unglazed, lidded pot; especially for dry food. My recommended method is to soak the pot and the lid in water for about 20 minutes beforehand, since the clay is porous it will retain some water. Then when you cook your food in the pot the water inside will evaporate into steam, with the lid on the steam will be trapped inside the pot and will keep your food moist.
Warning: I strongly recommend that you buy some heavy duty thermal oven gloves to handle the cooking pots with as they can get extremely hot, these gloves also have a grip surface so you won’t drop all your food!
Once we were confident that our concrete base was level, we decided that we wanted a grill for our stove so that we can use it as a barbeque in the future; as an alternative to cooking in the actual ashes.
Our stove is a meter in diameter, so a grill of the right size is hard to come by. We needed this grill to be custom made for us by Metal Master Canterbury (link down below).
The grill needed to sit 2 inches below the rim of the stove. Now that it’s fitted, we’re ready to cook!
To keep up the appearance of the stove we have to sand the surface down with sandpaper first, before applying olive oil.
We’ve also had to build a concrete base underneath the stove, ours is square with dark slate tiles. You will need to do this to protect the surface underneath the stove (grass, wooden patio, etc.) from burning.
I have recently built a fire pit in my garden. Originally we set this low in the ground , but this was not right. As it gave us back ache reaching down to light it. Also the cooking pots are just too heavy to lift out again. After some re-designing we have found the right height for the pit.
I intend to cook on the fire pit and eventually create recipes. I will create videos to share with you all.
