Bread on a stovetop & other hot weather baking strategies

It's another hot summer. Until the record heat has passed, my oven is a food storage space to protect edibles from sugar ants.
How are folks baking pastries and loaves without turning on the oven? Please share your successes!

Amy, I'm with you.  At times it has been too hot to cook at all, cold salad time I guess.

My navy/soup beans are now nearly equal to what my mother made.  The only thing that would be even better, fresh baked rolls!  I'm ready to learn how to bake bread, but that will not happen for a few more months.


Peace

It cools off here pretty nicely after the sun goes behind the hills (in the 50s - low 60s), so I bake then. Otherwise we’d have no bread.

I am a huge baker, so summertime always poses a challenge. Getting a toaster oven last year was a game changer. It's a small toaster oven, but it is just big enough to fit a loaf pan or 8x8" square pan. It allows me to bake things without heating up the whole house.

Pre-toaster, I tried to limit my baking to griddle breads like English muffins and naan. Stovetop steam baking and thermal cooker baking are interesting options for avoiding the oven, but I don't have much experience with either because my baking pans do not fit into my stockpots. I think I may have tried steam baking with ramekins once. If I recall correctly, it worked okay but was not comparable to the results of the oven. Still, it would do in a pinch if you are intent on baking and want to minimize the heat.

Some options for fresh bread without using indoor oven:

-flat bread like pita/naan/tortilla cooked on outdoor grill or fire pit. Or even use a traditional tandoori oven or comal.

- use small appliances if indoor is your only cooking option. Toaster oven was mentioned already. A countertop electric steamer could make steamed buns, Boston brown bread, tamales, or similar breads. There’s even the countertop bread makers that were popular 20 years back. Most of the year, why bother with that weird little unitasker, but in a heatwave seems worthwhile.

I do a lot of flatbreads, evening baking, and small appliances, like toaster oven, griddle, waffle iron, and even grilled flatbreads & pizzas. Most of ours is gf/keto, but even when I'm doing sourdough (I can, if it's organic wheat), I'll turn it into flatbread. Almost any dough is versatile enough to be used in a lot of ways...

I often get up way too early, if I have planned ahead I bake the few things I use the oven for then.  Nothing like the smell of fresh baked chicken just out of the oven and set aside to cool at 5:30 in the morning.

I have often said that if I ever remodel or build another place, I will have an outdoor/summer kitchen, mostly for the canning.  I might as well plan for a full size stove with an oven.   I am making myself a little hungry  thinking about warm buttered rolls!!!


Peace

Deane Adams wrote:I have often said that if I ever remodel or build another place, I will have an outdoor/summer kitchen, mostly for the canning.  I might as well plan for a full size stove with an oven.   I am making myself a little hungry  thinking about warm buttered rolls!!!
Peace

THIS!! I've always wanted a summer kitchen - screened in, & with storm windows, in case I need a 2nd kitchen, in cold weather - like around the holidays. With all the cooking, baking, fermenting, curing/charcuterie, brewing/ wine making, preserving, herbal remedies, and soap making we both do (80 - 90% from scratch, with most of the rest being complicated condiments), we trip over each other, if we try to work at the same time, and the kitchen gets hot, and it's impossible to keep clean... We've always know we each need our own kitchen.

What a great list of options so far!

Don’t bake when it’s too hot

Buy an electric appliance that can be used indoors or outdoors: toaster oven, bread maker, steamer, waffle maker

Use the stovetop: griddle breads, steamed breads, flat breads

Make bread outdoors with fire: gas or wood fired grill, fire pit, tandoor, (I’ll add horno and earth oven because these are part of my baking adventures)

Build an outdoor dream kitchen sometime in the future

What else are avid permie bakers doing when the heat is extreme and you gotta have bread?

Amy Gardener wrote:
What else are avid permie bakers doing when the heat is extreme and you gotta have bread?

My trash heap bread machine makes wonderful bread, does not heat the house, takes 5-10 minutes of fussing, and is done in 3 hours :)

My MIL had a special pan for baking cornbread on the stove-top.

That was the only way she ever made cornbread.

And this is perfect for a stove-top:

https://permies.com/t/259099/Pita-Bread#2471795

Anne writes,

My MIL had a special pan for baking cornbread on the stove-top

Does anyone use a "special pan" to bake on the stove-top that has a hole in the middle that allows the heat to rise through the center of the pan until it hits the lid then disperse along the top of the bread until the burner heat exits through little holes on the sides of the lid? This stovetop baking pan goes by brand names Wonder Pot from 1950's Israel (not to be confused with the haybox-type thermal bag or insulator) or the Omnia stovetop oven from Sweden, or the Tredoni stovetop oven from Italy. Depending on the brand, the stovetop oven looks like an angel food or bundt cake pan with a lid and a small donut shaped flame diffuser/focuser that fits directly over the burner. The small chimney pipe in the middle is the defining feature, much like a Kelly Kettle or a copper water heater that uses the central pipe to allow heat to rise and heat from the bottom, exterior, and interior. The system uses very little fuel and focuses the heat directly on and through the baked items instead of heating an oven box.
With that little background, I will say that this special stovetop baking pan has been my baking obsession for the better part of a year. At medium heat on a small gas stovetop (indoor or outdoor), this pan can make a perfect donut shaped loaf in the same time as an oven loaf. Using home rolled phyllo sheets, I've made flakey fruit filled pastry rings and spanakopita. With practice, loaves can be brown and crunchy on the outside, tender crumb on the inside.
I'm happy to share my tricks with this special pan if anyone is interested. If anyone else uses the pot for stovetop baking, your stories and experiences are invaluable: much is on the WWW but not many people are writing who are really skillful at making the pan work.

I've never seen one like that, before - I mean other than the bundt or angelfood cake pans. What a cool pan! I'll bet it would work on a rocket stove, or a rmh, or even on top of the woodstove, too!

Speaking of which, any one of the several rmh ovens, outside would work great, too, for keeping the heat out of the house.

i also love my air fryer oven (if you use the right pan, you can have bread really quick) but most of the time I make bread/cake either steamed in my rice cooker (out on the porch!) or flatbread on the stovetop (turkish or chinese). I shifted from loaf bread in the oven a few years ago when there was a cooking gas shortage, and we've never really looked back.

If you have access to an outdoor fire setup almost any kind of quick or yeast bread can be cooked in a Dutch oven along with pies and cobblers.  Or just use charcoal briquets.  I like to make my own mesquite chunk charcoal.  We did that a lot when we lived off-grid.  Both biscuits and cornbread (in the form of corncakes) can be cooked on the stovetop.  I've baked all kinds of bread in an old Coleman stovetop oven.  Now days we use the Traeger for yeast and quick breads (an old re-furbished one), we also make quite a bit of lavash type flatbread on an old plow disc set upside down over a little simple stove made out of a piece of 10" pipe.  I have an air fryer but haven't quite figured out the versatility of it.

Judy writes,

(W)e also make quite a bit of lavash type flatbread on an old plow disc set upside down over a little simple stove made out of a piece of 10" pipe

Awesome! Lavash the Book video shows the technique on a wok. The plow disk set up sounds bigger and more challenging. Thanks for another summer bread making idea outside of the house!
Are you able to provide more details so we can replicate the 10" pipe stove?

Over all, I'm lucky as we don't get the type of heat most people get, but it's still too hot to want to heat the house without thinking it through!

Big heat wave, I have a small metal table that can sit on the front porch and I have a bread machine, electric fry pan, and slow cooker I can use there.

The problems are: 1. typical of this ecosystem the house is 2-story on slab with kitchen on the upper floor. Anything that needs to be cooked quickly or supervised closely is a nuisance to cook outside. A truly full-service summer kitchen would solve that issue!

2. Many of the wood-fired solutions if they're outside, need to be constantly supervised, so without outside work-space, that is also not practical.

3. Solar cookers in my climate have too narrow a window of effectiveness. Any that would work would again need to be supervised, or would have to have some sort of auto turning method.

So I'm still at the either bake very early in the morning  and as soon as the oven is off, open it and put the fan above the stove on to suck as much of the heat out of the house as possible, or similar around 8 pm at night. We make pretty much all our bread and baked goods.

We also cook/bake in bulk, so we then only have to re-heat things for several days.

Amy Gardener wrote:What a great list of options so far!

Don’t bake when it’s too hot

Buy an electric appliance that can be used indoors or outdoors: toaster oven, bread maker, steamer, waffle maker

Use the stovetop: griddle breads, steamed breads, flat breads

Make bread outdoors with fire: gas or wood fired grill, fire pit, tandoor, (I’ll add horno and earth oven because these are part of my baking adventures)

Build an outdoor dream kitchen sometime in the future

What else are avid permie bakers doing when the heat is extreme and you gotta have bread?

I would like to add the rocket oven!
I recently built one, it’s super fast and very economical with the wood

https://permies.com/t/261226/Sourdough-bread-rocket-oven

Amazing rocket oven variation Benjamin! Thank you for the links to your outdoor bread oven build. This approach seems like a way to achieve a loaf of bread outdoors without baking the baker: small enclosed fire, well-insulated oven chamber, minimal fuel. Wonderful inspiration during this extreme heat.
Thank you Benjamin!

It doesn't get that hot that much here--there are always hot days in summer but not all summer. For me, most of the methods described are unappealing because they make one loaf at a time. I do all my own baking, and the bread I make four loaves at a time, every two weeks or so. I'd rather time the baking day for when it's not too hot--or even just endure the extra heat from the oven--than have to deal with this every few days. Sometimes we put a fan in the window over the stove, tho that's especially for boiling down tomato sauce or canning, when there's steam to suck out the window. Baking something else while the oven is going makes it more worthwhile; in the winter I usually bake a sweet potato, winter squash or potato--often the tiny potatoes go in a pot on the bottom of the oven under the bread (or cake or whatever), to be fed to my chickens. Carol Deppe says they shouldn't get raw potatoes. So this is a handy use for the pea and marble sized ones. But I don't have sweet potatoes or winter squash in summer. One thing I do to take extra advantage of running the oven is take my herbs the last step to being dry enough to crumble and put in jars, I hang them from the rafter when fresh, then put them in an old cake pan when they're papery dry. Then when I use the oven, after I turn it off and remove the bread or whatever, i put the herb pans in for half a minute or so, with the oven door open, and if that isn't enough put them in with the door closed for a few minutes after the temperature comes down.
But there is another issue here--my stove and oven run on propane. As an environmentalist, I'm trying to reduce the use of fossil fuels and plastic. We now have an induction burner, could perhaps get a whole stovetop--but for an oven electricity is out of the question because they use too much power and I believe need high-amp power, and we have an off-grid electric system. Aside from the desire to reduce fossil fuel use, someday propane will not be available, and we may still have a usable solar system and induction burner, but that won't do for baking. We're talking about building what my husband calls a barn, and one thing is would be for is boiling down maple sap, sorghum, maybe tomato sauce--but it wouldn't be good for an oven unless we got a woodstove with oven. Another option would be a solar cooker, something I haven't yet experimented with. I note there might be possibilities with a fresnel lens to intensify solar heat. My husband and a neighbor tried using one they got off an old TV and set into a frame, focused it at a piece of plywood, and in a few seconds had flame. But I think they could be dangerous, would need to be handled properly. The neighbor stared at the spot too long and spots in front of his eyes for days afterward (fortunately that did go away). The other thing about a solar oven is that they bake slowly, never go=et to 350 degrees, and to keep the heat maximal you have to move them to optimal orientation to the sun. And of course they're useless on a cloudy day. Here, and I think in most of the northern US, it's cloudy most days in winter--but of course, the issue for this thread is baking when it's too hot.

I am a tortilla junkie! Organic, stone ground, blue corn... on a skillet! Fast and not too much wasted heat. I would love to build an outdoor kitchen... attached to the house. Old inner ring suburban building codes would have a fit. We need to be planning for future heat survival and energy reduction. More power to rocket stoves!

Amy Gardener wrote:Anne writes,

My MIL had a special pan for baking cornbread on the stove-top

Does anyone use a "special pan" to bake on the stove-top that has a hole in the middle that allows the heat to rise through the center of the pan until it hits the lid then disperse along the top of the bread until the burner heat exits through little holes on the sides of the lid? This stovetop baking pan goes by brand names Wonder Pot from 1950's Israel (not to be confused with the haybox-type thermal bag or insulator) or the Omnia stovetop oven from Sweden, or the Tredoni stovetop oven from Italy. Depending on the brand, the stovetop oven looks like an angel food or bundt cake pan with a lid and a small donut shaped flame diffuser/focuser that fits directly over the burner. The small chimney pipe in the middle is the defining feature, much like a Kelly Kettle or a copper water heater that uses the central pipe to allow heat to rise and heat from the bottom, exterior, and interior. The system uses very little fuel and focuses the heat directly on and through the baked items instead of heating an oven box.
With that little background, I will say that this special stovetop baking pan has been my baking obsession for the better part of a year. At medium heat on a small gas stovetop (indoor or outdoor), this pan can make a perfect donut shaped loaf in the same time as an oven loaf. Using home rolled phyllo sheets, I've made flakey fruit filled pastry rings and spanakopita. With practice, loaves can be brown and crunchy on the outside, tender crumb on the inside.
I'm happy to share my tricks with this special pan if anyone is interested. If anyone else uses the pot for stovetop baking, your stories and experiences are invaluable: much is on the WWW but not many people are writing who are really skillful at making the pan work.

I found this online: https://www.aiphomeimprovements.com/tn/tredoni-stovetop-baking-hollow-ring-pot-11-aluminum-oven-pot-28-cm-11-inch-7352490.html

I have no experience, but would look to outdoor possibilities such as previously mentioned.

In high school, I worked part-time in the local bakery.  The oven was the size of a room...the bakers started at 4 or 5 in the morning to have the bread ready for fresh sale and delivery by the time of opening hours (9:00?).  

I often bake sourdough bread & pizzas in a cast iron skillet. Medium heat with a good top cover does the trick.  

Mike writes,

I often bake sourdough bread & pizzas in a cast iron skillet. Medium heat with a good top cover does the trick.

Do you preheat the cast iron skillet and/or the lid to get that blast of heat (oven spring) to help the sourdough bread rise?

No. I let it rise in a glass bowl for as long as needed. Usually about half a day or overnight. Then after carefully transferring it into the cast iron I let it sit another hour or two to replace the bubbles it lost during the transfer. That 2nd rise time is not 100% necessary with careful transfer but it does help a little.

A recipe for pizza can be adapted: the dough can be flattened and cooked in an ordinary frying pan. For the pizza it's then dressed and put under the grill, but can equally be turned over in the pan if you're after bread. I thought I'd try the low energy way and put my soda bread mix (same as I've been using for the pizza) in the microwave. That result's very chewy!

As you are concerned about the heat generated in summer from using your oven a solar oven set up outside is easy to make. I use mine from end of spring to mid autumn as here in Australia we have lots of sun. As you only need it for summer this would be a cheap easy option. There are plenty of DIY's, check this out    and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK5-m8b4igc

Randy Eggert wrote:

Amy Gardener wrote:Anne writes,

My MIL had a special pan for baking cornbread on the stove-top

Does anyone use a "special pan" to bake on the stove-top that has a hole in the middle that allows the heat to rise through the center of the pan until it hits the lid then disperse along the top of the bread until the burner heat exits through little holes on the sides of the lid? This stovetop baking pan goes by brand names Wonder Pot from 1950's Israel (not to be confused with the haybox-type thermal bag or insulator) or the Omnia stovetop oven from Sweden, or the Tredoni stovetop oven from Italy. Depending on the brand, the stovetop oven looks like an angel food or bundt cake pan with a lid and a small donut shaped flame diffuser/focuser that fits directly over the burner. The small chimney pipe in the middle is the defining feature, much like a Kelly Kettle or a copper water heater that uses the central pipe to allow heat to rise and heat from the bottom, exterior, and interior. The system uses very little fuel and focuses the heat directly on and through the baked items instead of heating an oven box.
With that little background, I will say that this special stovetop baking pan has been my baking obsession for the better part of a year. At medium heat on a small gas stovetop (indoor or outdoor), this pan can make a perfect donut shaped loaf in the same time as an oven loaf. Using home rolled phyllo sheets, I've made flakey fruit filled pastry rings and spanakopita. With practice, loaves can be brown and crunchy on the outside, tender crumb on the inside.
I'm happy to share my tricks with this special pan if anyone is interested. If anyone else uses the pot for stovetop baking, your stories and experiences are invaluable: much is on the WWW but not many people are writing who are really skillful at making the pan work.

I found this online: https://www.aiphomeimprovements.com/tn/tredoni-stovetop-baking-hollow-ring-pot-11-aluminum-oven-pot-28-cm-11-inch-7352490.html

I’m so sad it’s aluminum

I just rembered something I tried a few times with reasonable results. Edible bread but not especially good looking. I live in Texas where it is hot in summer. So I have experimented with using a car as a solar oven. It works fairly well. Very good at dehydrating too if you don't mind the car smelling like garlic & onions for a few days. I have baked bread in glass jars with a loose fitting lid & also in glass bread pans with a clear glass cover. Park in the sun & put the bread where it receives direct sunlight. That method also does good with rice & beans but both take quite a long time. Bread seemed faster. Haven't done this in a few years but might do it again this week just for grins.

Was sitting in the drivers license office today to get a minor change made. Boring wait to say the least. So I started thinking about cooking bread in the car again. Then I thought it would be good to take some pix to add here. Then I remembered some bread & pizza made in cast iron for some BBs. Enjoy.

https://permies.com/wiki/15/103081/pep-food-prep-preservation/Bake-pizza-PEP-BB-food#1187024

https://permies.com/wiki/10/102827/pep-food-prep-preservation/cook-soup-stew-pottage-chowder#881749

I'd had a question, but wasn't conveniently near the computer, so it's lost to the neurons....

Anyway, we watch a YouTube channel "Country Life Vlog" (I think) from Azerbaijan.  She regularly bakes outdoors in a variety of outdoor ovens.  That is inspiring me to get some fire-rated brick (a friend has a chimney company so I have a source for used bricks) and make a couple types of outdoor ovens.  I'd rather use brick than cob as it would need less protection from the elements.  The vision is to create a bit of a summer kitchen out near the garden...it wouldn't have access to running water, but we can work around that.  I would also like to grow something akin to a willow igloo nearby that could be used as a bit of a shelter for picnics.  One has to dream....

Derek writes,

I'd rather use brick than cob as it would need less protection from the elements.  

In my opinion, the greatest thing about cob (and willow for that matter) is that these natural materials are impermanent. The elements weather them and eventually, they go back to the earth. The neat thing about this for me is that I can change the outdoor kitchen when I get some new inspiration. Learning how to build takes practice. Practicing and dreaming with cob, adobe, rocks, wood, willow enables me to start immediately without any downside.. Mistakes are doorways into new breakthroughs. Demolitions are fun. Starting an outdoor kitchen without a huge investment is really rewarding. It's okay if the tide takes my beach fort.
The early episodes of Country Living Vlog are a lot more primitive than the latest episodes. Her first oven was cob and she made it in one day. Now, with 6.6 million+ followers, her oven is brick.
Good luck baking bread outside Derek!