Hello All,

Blast seems to think that if you have a griddle, you can cook almost anything. I'm not going to dispute that. However, I had an experience this weekend where I was forced to improvise my cooking appliance, and it turned out great, so I thought I'd share.

Two weekends ago, I took the family apple picking in upstate New York. This was great fun, and led to me having a huge bag full of delicious apples sitting around the house. Despite me eating two to three of them each day for a week, the number of apples in the bag never seemed to be getting smaller. Thus, when we had company coming over Saturday night, some sort of apple-based desert seemed to be prudent.

I decided to make an apple tart tatin, one of my favorite deserts. It is basically an upside-down apple tart. You start by cooking the apples in butter and sugar in a heavy, oven-proof pan on the top of the stove until the sugar caramelizes. Then you cover the pan in puff pastry and put the whole thing in the oven until it's done. Finally, you invert the pan onto a serving platter and you get a beautiful caramel colored apple tart. Yum!

So I turned on my oven to preheat it, cut the apples, and put the butter/sugar/apple mixture onto the stove. Eventually, the sugar began to caramelize and give off this wonderful candied apple aroma. All good. I unrolled a frozen puff pastry dough from the freezer, put it over the pan, and opened the oven.

And the oven was stone cold.

I fiddled with the oven for five minutes trying to figure out why is would not light, without any success as I watched the pastry dough get soft as the butter began to melt. It was looking like desert was not going to happen, until I had an idea. Why not cook it on my grill in the backyard?

I ran outside and fired up the propane grill, putting the whole pan with my tart on the "bun warmer" rack above the main cooking surface, and closed the grill cover. Ten minutes later it was looking good, and I threw some meat on the grill as well. Ten minutes after that and dinner and desert were ready.

And the tart was perfect! Sorry I don’t have pictures, but we ate all the evidence.

So this weekend's lesson is that it is entirely possible to bake on a propane grill, using indirect heat from the burners with the cover closed. No griddle required. Since the new home I'm moving into next month has an electric stove but a plumbed natural gas grill in the back, this may come in handy some day. . .

I hope someone found this interesting!

JesseLP

Well done!

Still love my griddle, though.

-Blast

You can also do pizza on the grill. If you use the frozen bake and rise type just place it on the grill bars. If cooking with fresh dough use a pizza stone on the bars. Takes less than 10 minutes! (and makes you a magician in the eyes of your 9 and 6 year old daughters :))

pizza is the best!

bake bread or cakes, cookies even. If you don't have a lid, use foil by putting several pieces together until it creates a lid large enough to cover the BBQ.

I love living where we can BBQ year round, but in the summer when I want to make pizza and not heat the house.. the BBQ is great.

SaucyRose

It's off topic, but not entirely.

Some years ago, I worked on tugs that had cast iron stoves, fired by diesle fuel. If you lit the stove, the whole galley got warm. If you did it in summer, the temperature in the galley would be unbearable.

I wanted dinner, was willing to cook, and we only had some much on board. My ingredients would allow me to make baked ziti, but I did not want to crank up the stove. We had a little Weber grill and used it to bake the ziti. I filled it up with coals, as soon as some of he coals were pretty hot, the ziti went on, the lid went on top and an hour later we ate. It worked. Wasn't he best meal I ever cooked, but it was good enough.

You can also bake in a crockpot/slow cooker, altho we usually do it in a metal pan that we put in the crockpot, setting it on a few SS nuts to provide some airflow under the pan...

Now that sounds interesting! can you expand on that OBG?

Camp Chef makes a special sort of dutch oven called the ultimate oven. Essentially it is pot with a big funnel section in the middle, kinda like a bundt pan, with a vent at the top of the funnel. It also has a removable grate on the bottom, and a rack that fits near the top of the funnel. Using a heat source like a stovetop or a propane grill or even a propane burner, you can bake breads, roast meats, and steam vegetables in it. You don't have to have any top heat like baking with a conventional dutch oven. They also make a larger version they call a turkey roaster, which will handle up to an 18 lb turkey, or the equivalent of any other food type.

I've done similar to what OBG has with a stock pot and a cake, pie, or casserole pan on the stovetop. I place a trivet or sometimes clay or glass cooking beads in the bottom of the stock pot and sit the pan on that, then set the burner to medium/low to medium and check the temp inside. It works pretty good, especially if you are using a gas burner. I don't see why a crockpot won't do just as well.

For our small crock pot, we use a Wallyworld Grease pot to bake in. Being lazy, we often use some Jiffy cornbread mix or something similar. We have also done biscuits and brownies. You just put something like ss nuts in the bottom of the crock pot to raise the bottom of the baking pan enough for air to flow under it and bake away. We haven't done it for a while (we discovered it when we had our first motorhome, it had no oven. Now we have an oven, so we just use it instead of the crock pot), so I don't recall the baking times, but the old toothpic test works fine. We also have a larger oval crock pot, in it we used two loaf pans, the first sitting on the nuts, the second on a couple of pieces of coat hanger wire placed across the top of the bottom pan. That way we could bake two different things at the same time. We were surprised to learn that biscuits browned a little bit on top when done...

Coleman used to make a folding "oven", does anyone know if it's still out there?
to fit on their 2 burners, I recall. I bet it used tons of fuel, though.