How to Use a Camp Oven

What you need

Camp oven

Shovel

Fire with heaps of coals

A bit of wire or steel doubled over at one end for a handle and bent at 90 degrees at the other to pick the lid up with

Something for lifting the oven on and off the coals if it has no handle, a hat for instance

A big rock or a couple of bricks or anything at all that you can sit the lid on and keep the bottom of it clean

Patience

 

Burning In
When you buy a new oven, “burn it in”. What you do is build a big fire and put your oven on top and get it hot. When you think it is hot enough it probably isn’t, cause we’re talking bloody hot. Rip it off the fire and drop a good lump of fat (not oil) in it. Then put on a leather glove and rub round and round the entire surface of the oven with a couple of sheets of rolled up newspaper. If it catches on fire just throw the lid on for a second or two, and be pleased with your self because you have probably nearly got it hot enough.

Keep rubbing the fat into your oven and it will burn itself into the porous surface of the metal, until eventually you can see that you have made a new surface, similar to what a BBQ plate looks like. That means you might be getting close so throw it back on the fire, get it hot and do it all over again. Make sure you do under the lid as well.

Repeat this until the surface of your oven is jet black and then keep rubbing with clean pieces of newspaper until there is not a drop of fat left in the oven. It should have a dull black hard surface and this will protect your oven for life. It will never rust.

Burning in an oven may take a while but it is important. We recommend you have a mate on stand-by to help keep the fluids up to you during this arduous task. The next thing to do with a new oven is cook “baked dinners” in it for a week. This will seal all those areas you are sure you covered but didn’t and will also ‘load’ your oven wall with flavour. Of course you don’t have to cook a baked dinner every day of the week, just make sure that your first few uses involve roasting meat and veggies and you’ll be right.

Ronnie Wilson

Camp Oven Temperatures

Assuming you already have a healthy campfire blazing, rather than try to balance your camp oven in the middle, shovel coals out of the fire to a cooking area and place the camp oven on them. The further you move from the fire, the more control you have over the heat and the more comfortable you will be while cooking. However, if you start making little piles of coals all through your campsite the one thing you will be sure to cook is the bottom of your feet. Coals will stay hot long after they stop glowing.

Do not put coals on the lid unless you are trying to brown the top of something or unless you only have access to really sad timber that only burns to ash and not coals and you just cant get any heat out of it. Some timber burns ‘hot and fast’, some burns ‘cool and long’, we recommend the stuff that burns ‘hot and long’, Gidgee wood being the ultimate in “Camp Oven Wood”.

In camp oven cooking, even the best cooks are at the mercy of raw materials. Peter,another good camp oven man, came out from the coast and was watching us prepare the evening meal, which was a big leg roast. He watched us sprinkle a shovel full of coals onto the ground and then throw the oven full of meat on it.

All this was well and good until we sat down to have a beer and recite some new poetry. Peter nearly had a fit. He thought we were going to be there all night unless we got coals packed around that oven like an anthill.

We then proceeded to have a polite discussion about the pros and cons of our different cooking styles and whose bloody place it is anyway. All became clear to Peter an hour later as he marveled over the quality of the “Gidgee” coals. They burn slow at a high, even heat, and take the guesswork out of camp oven cooking.

The shoe was on the other foot a few months later when we dropped in to sample Peter’s fine home brew. We were astounded at the amount of coals and mainly ash that he had to use on his camp oven to get anywhere. He actually has to completely bury his oven in ash and coals and replace this regularly so as to get any heat at all. The obvious problem with this is not only the amount of drinking time you miss out on while shoveling coals, but all the risk you run of getting ash and coal in your food.

So there you go, we can assure you that before long you will become an expert in judging the coal value of timber in different areas of Australia. That is why we will only describe the hotness of the oven and not the amount of coals to use in this book. You will just have to experiment.

Ronnie Wilson

Yab Babs

The trouble with these things is, to make them, you have to prepare a heap of yabbies that are already peeled. So for every one you put on a skewer, you eat about ten. Yabbies are like peanuts and beer, one is too many and fifty is not enough.

What you need

• Cooked yabby tails
• A couple of “Sweet Chilies” (They are the really long thick ones, 
  Capsicum will do but it is not as good)
• A couple of onions sliced length ways
• Bacon
• Fencing wire cut ten inches long for the kebab sticks

What you do

Wrap each tail in bacon and thread onto wire with pieces of sweet chilli and onion in between every tail. Cook until bacon is crispy. Bewdiful!

Tricks & Tips

You can cook this on the barby or on the floor of your camp oven

Rating

I wonder what the poor people are eating.

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