How to Cook with a Wood Stove

old-fashioned wood stove

Cooking With a Wood Stove

Are you wondering how to cook on a wood stove? My family often cooked food in a frying pan or saucepan on the wood stove when I was growing up. Sometimes we did a picnic-style meal and cooked hot dogs in the flames with the door open (under supervision, of course). Hubby and I had a wood stove installed so we can save money on heating bills, keep the house warm when the power is out, and so we can cook with it in winter. I’m so happy I have a wood stove!

Our house is small and there wasn’t space for the old-fashioned cook stove I’d been dreaming about. I would have loved to put in a stove like the one above from a pioneer cabin in Belvidere, Illinois. In fact, the spot where a wood stove made the most sense was a small corner in our living room. So we ordered a Regency wood stove that can be safely installed quite close to our wall.

We are very happy with the heat that this wood stove puts out. It doesn’t have an oven or a water reservoir. If you have room to fit a larger wood stove, you might want to consider one of the reproduction cookstoves available from Lehman’s. They will allow you to do a lot more baking and cooking all at one time. You can also add the option of a water reservoir that will allow you to keep water hot for washing dishes, making tea, or even filling a bathtub.

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Large Pot of Soup on the Wood Stove
This is our Regency wood stove…with a big pot of soup.

Cooking With a Wood Stove

Cooking with a wood stove requires some forethought. You don’t just turn on a burner when you want to scramble some eggs or make a pot of tea. The fire needs to be started ahead of time, allowing the stove to heat up. If you want to cook over high heat, you need to get the fire stoked up with a good bed of coals.

  • For frying, boiling, or canning foods, you will need a hotter stove
  • When simmering soups, reheating leftovers, or slow-cooking foods, keep a low, steady heat

You can’t ‘fix-it-and-forget-it’ when cooking with a wood stove. Fuel must be added and attention is necessary to keep proper heat levels and make sure your food doesn’t burn.

If you don’t have a cookstove with a built-in oven, you can purchase one that will allow you to bake on top of the wood stove, or use a Dutch oven for baking.

Before ordering an oven, measure the dimensions of the stovetop to be sure it will fit. Purchase an oven thermometer to keep the temperature close to what the recipe calls for.

If you do buy a stovetop oven, try practicing with it a few times. Build a fire to heat the house as you normally would. Place the oven with a thermometer on the stove and just watch to see what the temperature is. You’ll get a feel for how much to stoke your fire, depending on what temperature you need for baking.

cooking sausage on a wood stove
Cooking duck sausage on our wood stove

You can also let your fire die down to a bed of coals and cook foods in a small Dutch oven or a foil packet with some oil or butter to prevent sticking. This is a great way to cook hamburgers and potatoes with some sliced onion and a sprinkle of salt. In the autumn and spring, when the weather is cool but not freezing, you can let your fire die down and cook right on the coals like this.

The Learning Curve

It takes time to learn how to cook with a wood stove, so don’t expect perfect pot roasts and sugar cookies on your first try. Start out by heating water for tea, or making coffee with an old-fashioned percolator. When you have a pretty good idea of how hot to stoke up the fire, try a new project. Simmering a pot of soup for the afternoon while you watch football or knit a sweater is another easy cooking project. Making pancakes for breakfast or stir fry for dinner is a bit more challenging. You won’t want to build the fire up enough for this if the weather is still pretty warm. In the dead of winter, when the snow is blowing and the temps drop you’ll be happy to heat the house up.

Cooking With Wood in the Summer

Most likely you won’t want to heat up your house with the woodstove for summertime cooking. If you’d like to cook on a wood stove during warm weather, consider setting up a summer kitchen like our ancestors used to have. That might not be realistic for most folks, so try cooking in a Dutch oven or on a grill over a campfire in your yard.

Dutch Oven with hot coals
A Dutch oven works great with a campfire in the summer.

It’s a great feeling…

to have a wood stove and a good supply of firewood when the winter winds begin to howl and the snow blows. For most of my childhood, our house was heated with wood. It was hard to go away for the day, but we didn’t have to worry about the power going out. I remember that Christmas seemed a little bit more special when we opened our gifts around the wood stove, with a tea kettle steaming and the cat and dog curled up on the hearth. We had to work hard in the summer and fall, helping load firewood into the trailer to haul home from the woods, then stack it in the basement for the winter. But it builds character to do some work…and I’m certainly full of character! Thanks to my parents for showing us that work is nothing to be afraid of and, if you plan ahead, you can be a little bit more self-reliant in this modern world.

Do you cook with a wood stove? What kind of stove do you have? Feel free to share any tips or experiences in the comments!

 
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