THE RUDIMENTS OF PIT COOKERY

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Allow the fire to burn for 45 minutes to an hour before it dies down. The smoldering coals will then keep the pit hot while you prepare the food that will go into the "oven".

LOADING THE PIT

Once you've readied your edibles for baking, scoop all the coals from the interior of the pit. ( Sometimes we just scrape them down to one end of the oven—and cook our food in the other end—since we rarely use the entire space for cooking.) It's important to keep the coals well away from your meal . . . because if you don't, the glowing embers will often burn awful-tasting little charcoal spots into the food!

OK. The pit's hot stone lining is now exposed and ready to do its work. At this point, the rocks are sufficiently toasty to fry (and/or burn) eggs upon . . . which means they're also capable of burning your meal unless some precautions are taken. The accepted practice among the peoples who habitually use the fire pit is to wrap their victuals in some kind of insulating material: fresh grass, large edible leaves, or other foliage. (Be sure the greens you use for this purpose are edible . . . don't just select any wild leafy plant at random.) You can, of course, wrap your viands in aluminum foil . . . but you won't get quite the flavor that way that you get with fresh watercress, for example, or maybe some mint or curly dock or dandelion.

In any case, lay a thick layer of your insulator on the pit's stone floor . . . place your victuals on top of the edible leaves ... then spread another heavy layer of greens over the meal and sprinkle about a cup of water over everything (the water, of course, will produce steam during the cooking period). Next, place a piece of cowhide (or carpeting, or slabs of bark, or plywood, or anything else that'll keep dirt from sifting through to the food) over the top layer of foliage. Quickly cover the entire area with about four inches of soil . . . then just go do something else for three hours.

When you return, carefully remove the cowhide (or other protective cover) . . . and prepare yourself for some mighty good eating!

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

I'll have to admit that our first attempt at cooking food underground was thoroughly experimental . . . which is another way of saying that we made a few mistakes. (Our first oven, for instance, turned out large enough to cook a medium-sized cow in!)

Take our word for it then: A pit oven need only be about three times the size of the food that you intend to prepare. (It doesn't even have to be that big: I've

cooked a whole chicken in a pit not much larger than the bird itself.) A fairly large excavation can, however, be used to bake small meals if you partition off (with a pile of dirt) the area you want to cook the food in.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print