Cooking on top of conventional woodstoves.

I'm kicking myself for not working this out sooner. We are in a time of energy price crisis, and obsessively turning off light switches. The smart meter goes nuts when we turn on the electric oven... and at the same time we are heating the living room with our wood burner.

Turns out that cooking on top of these is a thing, and there is a large and active facebook group of people doing it.

Facebook - Log Burner Cookery

I've yet to try it, but a trawl of the groups recent post looks promising.

Ideal for anything that needs cooking low and slow

Coins make useful trivets to get pots up off the hot surface for slower and more even heat

Tin foil protects the stove top

Heavy pans with good lids recommended

Every stove is different - some have a suitably hot top surface, other don't. Experiment.

I'm thinking of doing a nice batch of chilli over the weekend.

Some good suggestions, thanks for sharing the link. :)

First thing we did when I was a kid and the power went out in the winter was put a pot of coffee on in the percolator on the woodstove. We cooked a bit on it to experiment, but really, would just light the cookstove if the outage lasted any time.

We used cast iron. I recall pushing the pan around to different areas to change the temperature. We also had a slate tile on the top we could put things onto.

The area above the stove can also be very good for drying things like biscotti, orange peels,  sliced apples, raising bread, making yoghurt, etc.  We used to bake (and occasionally burn) things that like low heat, like meringues, in the warming oven above the cook stove. I suspect something similar could be rigged above a normal wood stove.

Wow, mate, what took you so long? Welcome to the fold!

I love cooking on my woodstove! My normal stove is an electric coil stove, and it's a pain. The burners aren't level, to maintain heat they turn on and off (this tends to make things burn suddenly), and the coils heat certain parts of my pan more than others.

My woodstove, on the other hand, has relatively even heat for the whole pan. Some places are hotter than others (the front middle is hottest, the back left is coolest. Using a trivet keeps things cooler, too), and generally the heat stays pretty consistent for a long time.

Like you said, woodstoves are great for soups, stews and slowcooking things. But, they work well for things you cook on medium-low to medium. I can also add in a bunch of smaller sticks and undamper the woodstove, and cook things at like medium-high. But....cooking at that temperature sometimes heats up the house a lot (great for boiling water to make tea or coffee in the morning--not so great when it's already 70ºF in the house and suddenly it 80ºF!). It's also not so fun to stand in front of a stove that's at 600ºF--it made me understand the saying of "laboring over a hot stove"! You also have to keep feeding the fire to keep it hot enough, and it sometimes takes a while for it to get hot. But, it is doable, and it does cook much more evenly than my electric stove. I just usually only use my woodstove for medium-high cooking when my power is out!

I tend to keep my woodstove top's temperature at around 350-400ºF. This is about the same as "4" on my electric stove top (electric stove top goes 1-10).

I also added a brick tower to the left of my woostove--this acts as a nice place to put things while I'm cooking, as well as a great "stay warm" area. The soap stone that covers the right side of my woodstove acts as a thermal mass, and it a great place to not only dry wool mittens, but also to melt butter and chocolate and to keep things warm!



Another great resource for cooking on a woodstove is fellow permie, Kate Downham's A Year in the Off-Grid Kitchen. There's also another thread here on permies about Wood burning stove cooking

I cook on my woodstove year round and love it. We have a cooking stove with ovens as well as top heat, and don't use any gas or electricity for cooking.

A few random tips from me:
• Use dry wood! Just as with heating, wet wood is first taking heat from the fire to dry itself off, before giving off the tiniest amount of heat in return. Dry wood is always best.
•If you're trying to get it really hot, use lots of small/medium pieces of dry wood and feed them often, so that not too much heat is being directed towards lighting new wood.
•Get to know the air intake settings and find the perfect settings to cook different things on. Observe and interact.

I have no wood stove but now I'm curious-does anyone cook IN the stove?
I'm thinking a roast in a Dutch oven, with potatoes and onions...

Jacket potatoes were a big success yesterday. I put a heavy cast iron pot, with a good fitting lid, directly on top of the stove. Just popped two large spuds in and came back four hours later.

The temperature is comparatively, so the long cooking time was appropriate. The spuds were cooked to a beautiful sweetness. I’ve put more on the stove again for lunch today.

I love that you can just put them on and totally forget about them. That and I don’t have to pay to run the electric oven!

William Bronson wrote:I have no wood stove but now I'm curious-does anyone cook IN the stove?
I'm thinking a roast in a Dutch oven, with potatoes and onions...

I've cooked potatoes in tinfoil in the stove, but nothing else. Even wrapped tightly in a couple layers of tinfoil, the potatoes were very smokey tasting, so you'd probably want to take that into consideration.

William Bronson wrote:I have no wood stove but now I'm curious-does anyone cook IN the stove?
I'm thinking a roast in a Dutch oven, with potatoes and onions...

One issue you can run into is too much heat. You generally end up having to let the fire burn not just down to coals, but down to relatively few coals at that. This creates a scenario where a large item like a Dutch oven full of stuff will not cook before the few coals burn out. Maybe if you had a stand to set it on which allowed you to feed fresh charcoal under it it could work.

I did have one once that had a ledge along both sides on top of the firebrick lining. I could cook shish kebabs that were just the right length to rest on those ledges. That worked well since they are small enough to cook quickly over high heat. You can similarly cook on a stick like hotdogs over a campfire if you can run the stove with the door open. Steaks can be cooked directly on a bed of clean, hot coals I have read, but I haven't tried it.

+1 on cast iron for stovetop cooking, especially the enamelled kind.

Years ago we were presented with 8 large breed puppies (surprise!). They were eating us out of house and home. So I got big bags of hog mash from the feed store (barley, soy, raw canola) and cooked up dog porridge on the wood stove. Smelled pretty good. They would push away the high-end commercial dog food to get at it.

Never burned a single batch in the cast iron pot.

I've been trying to bake bread in the stove, and have burnt a few batches!  I've learned to make smaller rolls instead of big loaves, and to check sooner and oftener.  The dutch oven gives a better bake, but is harder to maneuver in our small stove:  it only just fits, and is heavy and awkward especially when so hot;  I have to sit down on the floor in order to put it in and out so I don't have a lot of leverage.  I can put the rolls in a regular roasting tin (covering the top with foil to keep out ashes);  these take about 5 minutes, instead of 30 minutes or more in the electric oven--I have to watch them like a hawk so they don't burn.

I've only been attempting to cook with my stove this winter, as we only had it installed this year.  It's been hard to keep it hot enough on top for longer cooking, but we keep a kettle and a large pan of water on top;  the kettle water does sometimes boil and can be used for hot drinks, but mostly it needs to be finished in the electric kettle before making tea/coffee.  The large pan is for washing dishes, and usually needs to be diluted with cold tap water to cool it down  I can put on a pan of porridge, or some hard boiled eggs, and these will cook but take longer than if on our induction hob.  Still, it's "free" and I don't mind waiting most of the time.

Here is an interesting article from Backwoods Home Magazine about cooking on top of a wood stove and cooking in the firebox with recipes:

https://www.backwoodshome.com/woodstove-cooking/

Rice pudding this evening was a big success. It stuck to the bottom of the pan a bit, but didn’t actually burn. Not burning is remarkable, as my wife was in charge of it!

Beef stew tonight. Everything was cooked, but I was hoping that the meat would have had enough time to really soften down. It hasn’t.

I think the issue was that the pot wasn’t properly hot through when it went on the stove. It was hot enough to cook all the veggies, but not to break down the collagen in the meat. A combination of the stove being left a bit too low, too large a volume of stew, and not having it already piping hot when it went on. It was still properly yummy though.