Cooking a roast in a dutch oven has been my holy grail. I've also been captivated by the idea of cooking it packed in rock salt - how does that change the roast? Does it help turn out a better roast? How salty is the result? I'm glad to have finally answered these questions.
I made Frito casserole for some friends at a campout. The recipe isn't complicated or particularly healthy but it is very tasty. It even got a few recipe requests! The only substitution I made was switching out for low-sodium cream of mushroom. It cooked for about 25 minutes in my 10 incher dutch oven with a 14/7 coal split. The resulting casserole had fully melted cheese and the internal goop was hot enough to require cooling a bit.
I baked the same stew as the previous recipe with the few tweaks mentioned. The low-sodium cream of mushroom worked just as planned and picked up the flavor of the stew by letting you taste more than the salt. A few of the bacon pieces were not as crispy which some people complained about: I guess people don't want a whole bacon. I was in a time rush otherwise I would have made all the bacon crispy. The finished product was delicious and a very solid addition to my repertoire.
Gil's LotD readers: I've decided to bring my dutch oven cooking blog posts into this blog. If you're not interested in this or future blog posts there is a page available here with only links of the day on it. RSS readers can find a feed on that page as well.
This recipe was pulled off of the Yahoo dutch oven mailing list archives. I spent an hour or so the previous day looking for a stew recipe to polish up for the next DOG meeting and settled on this one. I prepared it without the onions, with a can of water and with only two carrots.
I followed the recipe off the back of the Creamette macaroni box. Note: the proportions are for half of the box of noodles!
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp flour
2 1/2 cups milk
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese (I just used a whole block which was probably closer to 3 cups)
This recipe is from the Yahoo dutch oven mailing list.
1 lb kielbasa sliced
1 lb ground beef
1medium chopped onion
1/2 lb bacon cooked & crumbled
3 or 4 big cans pork beans
1-1/2 cup ketchup
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup molasses
1 tbsp Worsestershire sauce
2 tbsp prepared yellow mustard
cook hamburger and onion, drain.
Mix in other stuff.
Put in slow cooker for several hours to simmer or Bake 30 min @350. Stir to prevent burning bottom.
This was two or three weeks ago. I finally took a stab at cooking a roast. This was mostly a failure: after an hour of cooking (estimated time was an hour to an hour and a half) I was not even halfway to rare. I pulled the charcoal off and dumped it into the oven for a done but not pink roast.
Yet another recipe from the fantastic Dutch Oven Madness. I did this a whole week ago but I should have all the details down.
Here was my second Dutch Oven recipe and a stab at filling my desire to make something filling. My family wound up eating it for dinner right before my little brother Pico left for college so it was not a failure, however the success I had was brought on by the quality of the recipe. This could be easily reproduced in a camp setting with a few hours of work. I certainly would lobby for it at a future campout. It produced 9 servings and with it not being unreasonable for a hungry camper to eat two servings (we certainly did) these proportions would be better matched for a small patrol.