Baking Pies in the Wood Cookstove

Though this post is a couple of months late, I wanted to document baking the Thanksgiving pies for our 2011 Thanksgiving dinner.  Of course, I had wanted to be baking in the house kitchen by November, but that was not to be.  Thus, since Nancy and I were in charge of pies for Thanskgiving, we ended up baking them down in the summer kitchen.

The first thing that I always do when baking pies in a wood cookstove is to build a good, hot fire.

A hot fire preheating the wood cookstove oven.

Most double-crusted pie recipes say that you should start baking the pie at 400 degrees or thereabouts for about ten minutes.  Then, you reduce the heat to 350 for the duration of the baking time.  This is to cook the crust first so that it won't be soggy and then cook the filling at the lower temperature until it is done.  Of course, when you are cooking with an electric or gas stove, this temperature change is easily accomplished.  With a wood cookstove, techniques for regulating the oven temperature for pie baking vary.  Here are a few suggestions:

a) Compromise the two temperatures and adjust baking times accordingly.  I have often had great success by maintaining an oven temperature somewhere between 375 and 400 and judging the doneness of the pie by the browness of the crust.  This is the method that I most frequently use.

b) Have your usual, steady wood fire burning on the grate, then heat the oven to 400 by adding very small pieces of kindling, corn cobs, small sticks (what I think of as "biscuit wood"), etc.  These burn quite hot, but do not burn long.  Thus, once the pie is put into the hot oven, a larger log can be added to calm the hot fire created by burning the small fuel, reducing the heat of the oven.

c) Some cooks advocate opening the oven door for awhile when it is time to reduce the oven temperature.  I've done this on occasion, but I don't recommend it because some baked goods are too delicate for this kind of temperature shock.

d) If your cookstove is equipped with a water reservoir which sits next to the oven side, I've read that you can be ready with a bucket of cold water to pour in it when it is time for the oven temperature to be reduced.  The addition of the cold water to the reservoir robs BTUs from the oven.

e) In the book Woodstove Cookery: At Home on the Range by Jane Cooper (a book which I should dedicate a blog entry to), guest contributor Barbara Streeter stated: "Fruit pies are the best in a wood stove.  If you have no thermometer on it--just build the fire real hot, till it's mighty uncomfortable to put your hand in the oven to test it.  Then quick put the pie in the bottom and let the fire die out slowly.  After forty-five minutes, it should be done.  If juice runs over onto the oven, shake some salt onto it and it will burn to a crisp and will easily brush away."

Anyway, the first pie that I assembled was the raisin pie. This pie is one of my favorites; unfortunately, I was the only one who ate a piece of it on Thanksgiving. I remember a family Thanksgiving many years ago when my grandmother on my dad's side made a raisin pie. I had not had raisin pie before that, and it was not until the mid to late 1990's that I finally ran across a recipe for it in a Reminisce magazine.

I always make this pie for our local town's Fourth of July celebration, and I don't think there's ever been a piece left at the end of the afternoon. Because our kitchen was all torn apart this summer, I made our Fourth of July pies at my parents' house and somehow managed to lose the raisin pie recipe between there and here. Thus, I was excited when one of my fellow faculty members at school suggested that I look for the recipe online.  I was easily able to find it here: Raisin Pie Recipe. Don't pay any attention to the negative reviews. I've recently found this same recipe on another very popular recipe site, and all of the reviews are quite positive.

This is a good wood cookstove recipe because while your oven is heating, you take advantage of the hot stovetop to prepare the filling.

The raisin pie filling ingredients when they are first put on the fire.

The filling once it reaches a boil. 

The hot pie filling poured into the bottom crust with the top crust waiting
on the rolling pin.

The assembled pie ready for the oven.

The raisin pie baking in the wood cookstove oven.
Pardon the appearance of the oven floor.  Obviously,
it has seen its share of boil-overs.

Once the raisin pie was in the oven, I began to work on the pumpkin pies.  The pumpkin pie recipe that I used belonged to my great-great grandmother.  As my grandma says, it is what pumpkin pie should taste like.  I started by assembling two pie crusts.

 

The two crusts ready for the pumpkin pie filling.

Grandma Ford's Pumpkin Pie

1 cup sugar

2 cups pumpkin

1 1/2 cups milk

1/2 cup cream

(if you want to omit the cream, use 1 3/4 cups of milk)

2 tablespoons flour

2 tablespoons molasses

3 well-beaten eggs

1 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

1/2 tsp. ginger

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

Combine all ingredients.  To ensure even distribution of the spices, mix them into the molasses before adding it to the rest of the custard.  Makes two nine-inch pies.

The recipe says to bake at 400 for ten minutes, then 350 for forty minutes.  I find that it is more reliable to insert a table knife half way between the edge and the center of the pie.  When it comes out clean, the pie is done.  I also notice that once the custard has risen to a uniformly shaped mound, it is ready to come out of the oven.  It will fall almost immediately and look the way we all expect pumpkin pie to appear.



Beating the eggs.

The prepared custard batter being poured into the unbaked crust.

The two pumpkin pies baking in the wood cookstove.  Notice that the pie nearest the firebox has completely mounded; it is done baking, but the one in the back corner of the oven still has a concave center.  It needs a few minutes more.

Things took a turn after that.  I mixed up a pecan pie.  It looked beautiful.  It smelled beautiful.  It was going to taste beautiful.  As you can see from the picture below, however, it didn't look so beautiful on the floor.  While I was taking it out of the oven, I managed to drop it!

An entire pecan pie on the floor in front of the cookstove.

The problem was that somehow, during the family reunion back in August, the pics of which are here, the right hinge of the oven door got broken.  Unfortunately, this makes removing baked goods from the oven a two-person affair.  I thought that I could get the pecan pie out without help, but I was wrong.  Balancing the oven door on my knee and removing the pie turned out to be too much, and the pie suffered the consequences.  I started over on the pecan pie, but the second one was not as pretty, so I'm not going to blog about pecan pie here. 

The offending hinge.

The last pie to be made was an apple pie.  It's getting late, and this post is already quite long, so I'll just show you some pictures of the process.  Really, apple pie needs its own blog entry anyway, don't you think?

I wish that we had gotten some shots of the finished products, but hindsight is twenty-twenty, you know.  Hopefully, I'll get better at this blogging thing.  At any rate, the pies were delicious, and baking them in the wood cookstove contributed to their excellent flavor.

If you bake in a wood cookstove, please leave a comment and let me know about some of your methods of regulating the temperature.

Marjorie the Margin Gem Cookstove Is in the Kitchen

In the ongoing saga of our kitchen renovation, we are getting a little closer to the installation of the wood cookstove.  Delays have been numerous, but I don't want to go into that here.  I did want to share a few pictures, though.

Our nephew posing inside the firebox of the Margin Gem.

Our nephew visited us last week, and as he and I were playing jump around the house (in which he did all of the jumping and I did all of the lifting), he "jumped" into the firebox of the stove as it sat awaiting the plumber to return to finish the job of connecting it to our water supply.  We thought that the picture was too cute to pass up.

At any rate, as we were shopping for our new cookstove online, one of the things that frustrated me was that there seemed to be a deplorable lack of photos of the Margin Gem from all angles.  As the back of our cookstove will be quite visible from the dining room and immediately as you enter the back door of the house, I was very curious to know what the back of the Margin Gem looked like.  The back of the Qualified range sat farther out into the kitchen, and it was quite visible.  Unfortunately, it was also not very attractive.

As you can see below, the back of the Margin Gem is simply a straight black panel, and compared to what we are used to, it is very chic.  Many stoves have their flue exit out the rear of the stove, thus causing the back of the stove to be pretty utilitarian and rather ugly.  Because the flue exits out the top of the stove in front of the backsplash, the back of the Margin Gem is quite nice.  This flue design coupled with a built in heat shield which is standard on the lower part of the stove also allows the rear clearances of the Margin Gem to be 6" from a combustible wall.  The low clearances were a huge selling point to us because we were tired of the stove sticking out so far into the kitchen.

The back of the Margin Gem cookstove from the firebox side.

While we were doing our shopping, we seriously considered the Heartland Oval, but the optional heat shield which can be attached to the rear of that cookstove was not only expensive, but also rather unsightly when compared to the Margin Gem. In the pictures, you see the stove moved out into the kitchen.  Nancy and I moved it this morning in order to facilitate the plumber continuing his work today.

The rear view of the Margin Gem from the reservoir side.

Front right side view of the Margin Gem.  As much hardware as could be removed
is missing so that it is as light as possible while we continue to move it around to
facilitate cabinet construction, tiling, etc.  In addition to the lids on the top, note that the faucet
to the reservoir has not been installed yet, either.

This view shows that the soot cleanout door under the oven is missing,
and so are the two bell drafts from the ash door and the left side.

The range boiler is almost ready to be attached to the cookstove.

As you can see, progress is being made, but I am having a tough time being patient.  As I write tonight, a howling north wind is making our temperatures plummet, and the forecast high for tomorrow is in the low 20s.  This is the time when having a woodburning cookstove is most ideal, and all we can do is stare at ours.  I wish that we could have re-installed the Qualified while we waited, but Nancy was right when she nixed that idea because it would have been quite an imposition on the male family members who would have been called upon to move it over and over. 

All I can say is that I hope that the stove is installed and operating by the end of January and that February brings us several snow days during which I can stay home and cook up a storm.  Fortunately for everyone else, I'm not in charge of the weather.

As we progress with the stove assembly, I'll post more pictures in an effort to provide the internet with a place that shows the details which seem to be missing out there in cyberspace.  If you don't see a view of the Margin Gem that you'd like to see, please post a comment, and I'll try to get a picture that satisfies your curiosity.

Rosalie's Spice Bars

While we have been waiting for the house kitchen to progress far enough that we can install Marjorie the Margin Gem, precious little baking has been done around here since June.  I've mentioned in other posts that we have a couple of 20" propane stoves in the basement that we've been trying to limp along with, and we've learned to do some baking in the electric roaster, but neither of these methods are quite satisfactory, especially since the ovens on both of the stoves are wonky.  The one that I thought was stuck at 350 degrees no matter what seems not to be so attached to 350 as it used to be and has begun to run a little too cool for anything other than roasting or cooking things "en casserole."

Side note: I'm amused at how cooking on a wood burning cookstove gets in your blood and changes your thought processes.  When I began to notice that the oven on the propane stove wasn't hot enough and knew that turning the dial resulted in nothing, I experienced a fleeting moment when my mind was instinctually wondering what small sticks or corn cobs I could put in the broiler drawer to get the oven hotter.  Obviously, I didn't go so far as to try such an outrageous thing, but nonetheless, the thought most certainly crossed my mind before I was jolted back to reality by the cognizance that I could easily burn our house down by doing a thing like that.

At any rate, when Nancy suddenly remembered that she might need a pan of bars for our church's potato bake tomorrow, our only real options for accomplishing such a thing that had any sort of quality were to travel to either her folks' or my folks' houses and bake there or fire up the range in the summer kitchen.  We had already been away from home twice today, so I wasn't too excited about going anywhere and therefore chose to build a fire out in the summer kitchen.

The last time that I cooked on a wood cookstove was for the family reunion in August.  For me, this has been a long, long time.  In fact, this is the longest I've been away from a cookstove in ten years, and I've just got to say that tonight's baking felt good.  I trust that other wood cookstove enthusiasts out there will know exactly what I mean.  Standing next to a wood cookstove that is hot enough to bake in just plain feels right to me.  I probably can't even describe it adequately, but tonight while I was down in the summer kitchen working over the stove, it struck me that I feel like a stove ought to be a presence and a personality rather than a sterile, dead box.  Even in the summer, when the heat of the cookstove literally drives me out of the summer kitchen, it seems like it still subconsciously feels right.

Anyway, enough with this waxing poetic.  On to the recipe and pictures!

Tonight, I decided to make Rosalie's Spice Bars.  Rosalie is a former neighbor and longtime family friend, and she is an excellent cook.  Many recipes in my family's boxes bear her name.  Generally, our family simply calls these "Raisin Bars" because the raisins are really more the star ingredient than the two teaspoons of cinnamon which constitute the only spice in the whole recipe.

I chose this recipe tonight because it makes a large batch of bars, but I consider it a good wood cookstove recipe because you have to parboil the raisins before baking the bars.  I think that any recipe for something that starts with top-of-the-stove cooking but ends with baking is particularly well suited to the wood cookstove because it allows you to utilize the heat that the stove is emitting while you wait for the oven to heat.

Rosalie's Spice Bars

1 and 1/2 cups raisins parboiled

1 cup reserved raisin water

1 cup shortening at room temperature

1 1/2 cup white sugar

2 eggs

1 1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. vanilla

2 tsp. cinnamon

3 cups all-purpose flour

Start by placing one and a half cups of raisins in a saucepan.  Put enough water over them to cover them.  Place directly over the firebox and bring to a boil.  Once they have boiled, pull them over to the coolest part of the cooktop to steep for bit while you mix the other ingredients.

Cream the shortening and the sugar until fluffy.  Beat in the eggs.  Mix in the soda, vanilla, and cinnamon.  Drain the raisins, reserving the one cup of liquid.  Add the flour alternately with the hot raisin water.  The dough will be kind of fluffy.  Fold in the cooked raisins.  Pour into a greased 12" x 17" jelly roll pan.  Bake in a moderate oven until a fork inserted in the center tests done.  Let cool and frost with caramel frosting or cream cheese frosting.  We always use caramel frosting.  I'll put that recipe in a later post.

Raisin bar batter ready to go into the jelly roll pan
while a hot fire burns in the wood cookstove.
There is no electricity in the summer kitchen, so this
picture is taken in the light of an oil lamp.

The bars being put into the oven of the cookstove.  We used
the camera's flash in this picture and the next so that the color
of the bars is visible.

Golden brown doneness!  You can see that they cooked very evenly.
I turned them once after about fifteen minutes of baking.

A view from the top so that you can see the texture. 
Obviously, a smaller pan would be a problem!

They should be cool enough to frost now, so I'd better go take care of them.  They will be delicious!

Kitchen Progress

When we got home tonight, we discovered that we are one step closer to having Marjorie the Margin Gem installed in our house kitchen.  Our cabinet builder installed the woodbox/boiler stand that will be behind the cookstove.  The carpenter brought the boiler in (which we spray painted the silver color) from the shed and put it where it will stand so that we could see what it would look like.  The bottom cabinet is a large, deep drawer that will be our woodbox.  The part that is Durock will be covered with tile to match that which is on the chimney (last week's progress).  Many things have to be done before the stove is in, but we can see movement!

Waiting Patiently for a Kitchen

As I blog tonight, I feel a little guilty about doing so because the pile of school papers that I should be checking is quite high.  I guess I'd better make this short.

Progress on the house kitchen is slow at best, but at least we do have progress.  Drywall is in, and mudding should be complete early next week.  Our cabinet makers, who are basically in charge of everything from here on, will be here next week to lay everything out on the floor so we can "walk through" the actual dimensions of things.  After that, the chimney needs to have its exterior tiled, the cabinet which will sit behind the stove and hold the water boiler needs to be constructed, and the floor needs to be refinished.  Then, we will be ready to have Marjorie the Margin Gem cookstove make her way from the utility room, where she sits in a depressing state of disassembly, to the kitchen.  We won't be able to fire her until the plumbing is hooked up and water is in the waterfront, though.  Firing a cookstove that has a waterfront which has no water in it is risky business because dry waterfronts can be damaged too easily.

At any rate, I am hoping that I'll get to bake Thanksgiving pies in the Margin Gem.  I know that we won't be in any kind of shape to host Thanksgiving (much to my disappointment), but if I can just cook part of the meal here and haul it to Mom and Dad's, I'll have to be satisfied with that.

Fortunately, God has blessed us with a very warm autumn so far, so we haven't missed the heat of the cookstove very much.  Our little Jotul has had a fire in it only three times, and that has been enough to keep us sufficiently warm.  Since school started, time has been in short supply, so cooking down in the summer kitchen has not been feasible.  We have two old 20" propane stoves in the basement of the house, and most of the cooking has been done down there.  The only problem is that both of the ovens are wonky; one is basically unusable, and the other is stuck at 350 degrees no matter what temperature it is set at.  I've been learning to do some baking in an electric roaster, but I certainly miss the cookstove.

A view of the Qualified Range in the kitchen before
we began remodeling.

Some people have asked what we will be doing with the old Qualified Range.  Right now the Margin Gem cookstove is barricading it in the utility room, and it too is in a sad state of disassembly.  The answer to the question is that we have no idea yet.  I want to hold onto it until I have decided for sure whether I like the Margin Gem.  I can't imagine not liking the new stove, but it doesn't seem prudent to get rid of the Qualified until we're sure.

As money is always tight around here, one of the things that I've thought about is selling the Qualified Range to someone local and offering a couple of free lessons on how to cook on it.  I would love to have another wood cookstove cook close by to exchange ideas with.  We'll see.  As it is, I'd better go find my red pen and get back to my real job.

Marjorie Has Arrived!

Until June of this year, we had a Qualified woodburning cookstove in our house kitchen.  I had ordered it from Lehman Hardware back in 1997 when I lived in the little house on our farm.  I cooked on it a little over a year in that house, then it got a year's vacation when I moved into the big farmhouse.  Once I had the old kitchen chimney re-lined with stainless steel pipe during the next summer, the Qualified was again in use.  This stove has cooked a great deal of food (including four or five Thanksgiving Dinners), done a lot of canning, dried a lot of clothes, heated a fair amount of water, and saved us a ton of money in home heating. 

The Qualified keeping us warm a couple of days after Christmas 2007.

The Qualified working hard during "Apple Fest" in 2008 or 2009.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, we are currently remodeling our house kitchen.  There is nothing wrong with the Qualified, but we wanted an airtight firebox (I don't much enjoy middle-of-the-night trips downstairs from a warm bed to refuel) and a stove that would heat our hot running water.  As a part of the remodel, we removed the Qualified in June and ordered a Margin Gem cookstove from Stoves and More Online.  It arrived this month and now sits awaiting the kitchen remodel to be finished.  We named the stove Marjorie because Marjorie the Margin Gem seems to have a nice ring to it.

Marjorie was shipped from the Canadian factory to the Conway trucking terminal nearest us, and I went to pick her up after school a couple of weeks ago.  She spent a few days in the back of my grandma's pickup in a shed here on the farm, and then we uncrated her and invited helpers over to put her in the utility room for right now.  There she will sit in a sad state of disassembly until the kitchen is ready.

I wanted to post a few pictures that may help to illustrate how she was crated since I was quite curious to know about this before she arrived.  I'll apologize right now for ruining the pictures by being in them.  As you can see, I was not in charge of the camera.

The crate as it looked when loaded by forklift to the back of the pickup.

Reservoir side of the stove once the right end panel of the crate was removed.
The backsplash and warming oven were in a cardboard box that lay horizontally
on the cooktop.

Same view with two more panels of the crate removed.

The body of the stove was covered by cardboard which was strapped to it with metal bands.

Once the cardboard was removed, the plastic that the stove had been wrapped in was accessible.

Note the 2x4 frame attached to the bottom of the crate to support the oven side during shipping.

Front view with custom order sticker still attached beneath the firebox door. 
I'm figuring out how to remove the firebrick to make it as light as possible for unloading.

We can't wait to get it installed, but we have a long way to go before the kitchen will be ready.  My goal is to have Marjorie employed by November.  We'll see.

Wood Cookstove Cooking for the Family Reunion

Since Nancy and I live on the home place for my father's side of the family, we host a family reunion every so many years.  My dad's brothers and sisters and their families all come, and we have a great time being together, playing together, visiting together, and, of course, eating together.  My dad also had nine aunts and uncles on his mother's side of the family, and that branch traditionally had get togethers at our home when my grandparents lived here, so we invite his first cousins as well.  If I have counted correctly, we only had 39 guests at our maximum on Saturday night, but we planned on about fifty.  We actually ended up with enough food for 100, I think.

At any rate, we used the cookstove in the summer kitchen to cook corn on the cob for the crowd, so I wanted to show you a few pictures of what we did. 

My brother slow roasted a hog that he had purchased at the 4-H premium sale at our county fair.  He had lots of help and interested onlookers, and it smelled fantastic all day.  He set up the borrowed cooker next to the summer kitchen so that water was nearby.

Supper was scheduled for six in the evening, so I started the fire in the stove in plenty of time to get water boiling for the sweet corn.  We had four pots of corn cooking at once.

Lids removed on the pots to the right for the photo only.

Once the sweet corn was cooked, I pulled it out of the pots and put it in a stainless steel bowl.  The bowl was put on a cast iron trivet and sort of rested above the reservoir and the far right side of the cooktop.  The stove was putting out plenty of heat to keep the corn hot, and I poured a little bit of the water from one of the pots that the corn was cooked in into the bottom of the bowl just to create steam to keep the corn moist.

The large cooktop of the wood cookstove certainly came in handy for cooking for a large crowd!