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Am I missing something? Dutch ovens vs. tin foil


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What's up with lining your cast iron dutch oven with aluminum foil? I've seen a couple of other troops do it and, when searching the internet for dutch oven recipes, it looks like at least half of the sites start with "line your dutch oven with tin foil".

 

The only reason I've heard for doing this is simple laziness. They don't want to have to clean up but, if you take proper care of your cast iron, clean up is a breeze. Plus the foil seems to sometimes defeat the purpose (I've seen it lined all the way up and out so the lid won't even seat right).

 

Is there maybe some other legitimate reason for lining with tin foil that I'm missing?

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Other than laziness (yes, I've said it - let the slings and arrows commence) in not wanting to spend time in cleanup, the only other possible reason I can think of for lining the dutch over with foil is discovering, upon pulling the oven out to use for the first time in a few months, a layer of orange rust on the bottom of the oven that now means the oven needs to be cleaned and re-seasoned before use.

 

Cleaning a dutch oven (or other cast iron cooking utensil) isn't really that difficult or time consuming. I have a rope scrubber brush especially made for cleaning cast iron - some warm water, and this scrubber brush, is all thats needed to clean the dutch oven. Never use soap, just put some warm to hot water (comfortable for your hands) in the pot and scrub very well with the rope scrubber brush - then rinse. At thi point most people put the oven back on the first to warm up a little so that they can rub in a small amount of vegetable oil to protect the surface. A little trick I learned is instead of using vegetable oil, use beeswax. It's edible, and it won't turn rancid - buy a stick of raw beeswax from a beekeeper or a candle supply company, warm up the oven, rub the stick of beeswax around the inside of the warm oven to melt enough to create a thin coat, then use a cloth towel (or paper, if you must) to fully coat the inside of the oven with wax and soak up any excess. The whole process should take less than 10 minutes - and if you have stubborn, stuck on food, fill the oven with water, plop it on the fire, and let it boil for a bit to loosen the food.

 

CalicoPenn

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I love cooking with aluminum foil. But NEVER in a Dutch Oven.

 

You can rarely line a three dimensional Dutch Oven with two dimensional aluminum foil without something leaking through onto the Dutch Oven. So, you'll end up cleaning your Dutch oven, anyway.

 

You also lose the benefits of Dutch oven heat control and that special Dutch oven flavor. More importantly, you fail to treat your seasoning well. I've never seen someone who lines his/her Dutch oven have a well-seasoned Dutch oven. Properly seasoned, they are easy to clean and it's easy to cook such great treats as cakes (including pineapple upside down!), pies and breads.

 

It's also easy to keep a well-seasoned Dutch oven well-seasoned. After cleaning (with warm-hot water and a soft sponge/scrubbie), simply rub with a small bit of oil/shortening while still warm.

 

Don't just take my word for it. Check out the rules (and ethos) of the International Dutch Oven Society (www.idos.com)

 

- Oren

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Well, thank you Gern for the lovely compliment to the lady leaders!

 

Our dutch ovens are well-used and well-seasoned. We never line them with foil. For that matter, we never oil them before storing them either. We clean with hot water and a scrubby as suggested by others, allow them to dry thoroughly, place a paper towel inside with an edge hanging over the lip, and put the lid back on. Always stored in a dry place.

 

No rust, no rancid oil taste. Just perfect cooking every time.

 

 

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Do you need foil? No. Do people use it? Yes. Why? Here are my thoughts. Even with a well seasoned oven, it is entirely possible to get really, really burnt food stuck like super glue. This requires the already mentioned water in the pot and over a fire method of getting it to turn lose and scrubbing with all your might. Boys being boys, they don't always practice the best heat control continually taught be adults....the more coals, the better. Nor do they always practice the best cleaning techniques repeatedly taught to them. A scrub of a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 is the same as a 10 to them. The easy out is to line the oven with foil so program time is not eaten up with blasting burnt food off. We can debate whether or not this is laziness or being innovative, adapting and overcoming all day long.

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What Beaver said...

 

I'm kind of a DO purist, but I still find myself sometimes lining with foil just to make cleanup easier. We love DO lasagna, but it's a challenge to clean. The foil doesn't eliminate cleaning, but it helps.

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I've seen it both ways but we don't use foil. The worst problems I've experienced with foil is that it aways develops a hole somewhere and then the gooey stuff leaks through and you have the original cleanup problem,

Plus, the foil often loses shreds into the food itself, yech!

The problem with dutch ovens is that they barely fit into a backpack and they're kind of heavy.

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"Dutch oven flavor"?

"raw beeswax" ?

It's a pot!!

Some are made of Cast Iron and a lot of the cheap ones are aluminum.

Sure it is a very versatile pot. But it's still a pot.

I have used it to deep fry donuts, bake spuds and cook baked beans in. Sure we bake in them. When we make a Pineapple Upside down cake we line the base with foil or silicone paper if we don't the pineapple sugar topping remains in the pot.

Yes we sin and wash it in warm soapy water and then season it with some oil and salt. No we don't scour it with a Brillo pad.

Yes when stuff gets really stuck we have been known to give it a good boil out.

Eamonn

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Personally, I've found it takes much longer to clean a DO when tin foil was used than when it wasn't. It seems the tin foil leaks and then whatever is between the foil and oven ends up getting burnt on the oven, whereas if the foil wasn't there it wouldn't have.

 

I was a scout for six years and never heard of a DO. My biggest clean up problem was figuring how to get the soot off the outside of the pot, so it wouldn't get everything in our backpacks filthy, including the inside of the pot the pot would nest in. Covering the outside of the pot with soap before cooking never seemed to work as well as advertised.

 

SWScouter

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Oh good grief!!! Buy you guys books and send you to school and you still don't understand the use of foil!!! ;) Yes, foil tears if the person serving the food treats the DO like it has no foil in it and digs in with all his might to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Kind of like putting on Playtex gloves to keep your hands dry and then sticking your arms into the dishwater up to the elbows. Guess what is going to get wet? While not needed, a properly lined DO will not leak and won't tear if you don't serve like a linebacker.

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I don't use tin foil, but our Troop Committee Chair highly recommends it. No big deal either way. (Iron in diet good, aluminum in diet bad by the way.)

 

I've notice that the boys cook desserts in the Dutch oven and many times it is dark afterwards and cleaning tends to get very lax when dark with the boys.

 

FYI, the balled up tin foil makes a great scrub brush.

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  • 3 months later...

Just last night, our scouts cooked two different cakes/pies/cobblers in DO's. Both the fruit tended to settle to the bottom. By lining bottom and inch or two of sides with foil, we were able to turn them out onto a plate (like a cake) and then peel the foil off. No scraping required and clean up was fairly simple.

 

never tried parchment, but that will be our my next attempt, I use it here at home all the time.

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