Baking bread in the fireplace

Yesterday my wife experimented with baking bread in a coffee can in our fireplace, (our oven is on the fritz) and the results were astounding...it was delicious! It was an all-wheat bread and the fire really gave it a great smokey taste. She just had to keep an eye on it so it didnt burn.

I have purchased a grill that can be used over a fire, and soon we'd like to experiment with pizza as well. Steaks of course have been fantastic cooked over the open flames.

I'll see if I can get a recipe for that bread.

Be carefull, lest your clan start gathering around the ancient hearth and start TALKINg and telling stories insead of entering trance states in front of the teevee.

The campfire, nature's TV.

a clay flower pot works fine also..

Nope, it's more like a lava lamp.

Nature's TV is the storyteller, the bard, the spinner of yarns and tales. *grins*

"I'm dougwalkabout and I approve [of] this post." ;-)

Seriously, though, I love how our woodstove takes over as the "altar" in the living room as soon as we light it. It turns the TV into just another power-sucking idiot appliance. Then pull out the guitar and get some music going, crack another bottle of red, and life as we know it is very, very good.

Though when family start telling stories, one might occasionally wish for a "mute" button.

Gotta try that coffee can bread.

While I hope other that have posted in this thread are correct in their comments, I really liked the original post for another reason.

Someone experimented in cooking/baking. That it worked is even better.

Many of my early lessons in cooking came while I was trying to cook on an old tugboat that had a cast iron stove fired by diesel fuel. It had a firebox into which fuel entered and an air blower. You adjusted heat by adjusting the amount of fuel and air. What you never really knew was the temperature. In order to cook anything and figure out when it was done, one relied on old fashoned methods, like the toothpick inserted into a baked good or seeing when a turkey's juices ran clear. You also never wanted to turn it on during the summer, so a baked ziti in the summer was baked on a grill.

Using and avoiding that obsolete pile of iron made me experiment. A conventional approach didn't work, and the people who might have had such things in their homes at one time were all dead. It made me a pretty fearless cook, and I now have cooking methods that I've never seen anyone else use. Some of them are great.

...amen to that. I can stare at a fire for hours.

The great bread inspired me to make a huge pot of cream of potato soup tonight. Cold snowy night, hot soup, fresh bread, roaring fireplace. The beginning of winter is always the best. By late March, I'll be pulling my hair out, craving a bike ride.

El_Diablo, can you post up the recipe that you used? Also how do you cook in a fireplace??

Since I don't have an oven (let a lone a fireplace) where I'm living now. I've been experimenting quite a lot with making bannock on the stove. The trick I've found is using really low heat and only the barest layer of grease (I use bacon fat) so that the bread doesn't really fry. I've even made a chocolate bread. Its all been really tasty and while I'll spend most of the evening doing it, basing it on two cups of flour makes enough for me to snack on for three or four days.

I love to cook, but making bread really seems almost like alchemy.

If you want to do bread on the stovetop, might I suggest acquiring an "Ultimate Dutch Oven" from Camp Chef. Basically it is a camp dutch oven with a cone in the center of it, a ring grate at the base of the cone near the bottom of the pot keeps food from direct contact with the bottom, and another grate towards the top of the cone for steaming purposes. Both grates are removable. The cone allows for a more balanced heat application which works well for roasting and baking, and I've made rolls and monkey bread loaves in them on a few occassions, using a propane burner as the heat source. Currently I have the larger version, called the Turkey roaster, which will cook an 18 lb turkey on the stovetop in about 75 to 90 minutes. The turkey comes out moist and full of flavor, but the skin does not brown up or get crisp at all, so it is a tad different in that respect.

Anyways, it is an option. You could also get a small, inexpensive portable propane grill and make foccacia style bread on that fairly easily.

Lots of bread choices without an oven. Tortillas and chappatis are rolled flat and cooked on a dry grill, as are english muffins. Native american/italian fry bread/fried dough, yeasted or baking powder leavened is, well, fried. Corn pone or hot water corn bread is also a fried dough. Benjammin's dutch oven option is an historic favorite, but an oven is just a way of supplying indirect heat-any sauce pan will do, if you can devise a rack to keep the dough off the bottom and away from the sides of the pan as in a bedourie oven. . An oven can be made from a cardboard box.

In medieval times, peasants spent 80% of their income on bread, and bakers were regarded as alchemists-the church held special masses to bless them and their art of taking a bland beige powder and turning it into the wonder of bread. And now we have WonderBread, not wonderful at all, but much cheaper.