• Menu
  • Skip to right header navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Montana Homesteader

Sharing vintage skills so you can live a simple, more meaningful homemade life- one canning jar at a time!

  • Start here
    • Home
    • About
    • Shop
    • Privacy Policy
  • Newsletter
  • Recipes
  • Forage
  • Grow
  • Make
  • Preserve
  • Raise
    • Beekeeping
    • Chickens
  • Homesteading Resources
  • Start here
    • Home
    • About
    • Shop
    • Privacy Policy
  • Newsletter
  • Recipes
  • Forage
  • Grow
  • Make
  • Preserve
  • Raise
    • Beekeeping
    • Chickens
  • Homesteading Resources
You are here: Home / RECIPES / Cooking on a Wood stove

Cooking on a Wood stove

January 12, 2016 //  by Annie Bernauer//  5 Comments

Pin on Pinterest
Pinterest
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Share on Yummly
Yummly

I love figuring out new ways we can cook and bake without using electricity. This last year I’ve been experimenting more with baking and cooking on our wood stove. I figured if I learned how to do all of our Thanksgiving dinner cooking off grid and outdoors  I can surely manage figuring out how to cook a meal on our wood stove in the house. This last year I finally mastered the ability to cook a whole meal using just our wood stove including roasting the chicken, steaming vegetables, making gravy, baking the potatoes and even baking a loaf of bread! 

Baking and cooking on a wood stove and how you can cook a whole meal with no electricity | Montana Homesteader

This post may contain affiliate links. I receive a small commission when a product is purchased through these links, at no additional charge to you. Thank you for your support! 

The woodstove in our house is our only source of heat. Not only does it provide us warmth, it provides a relaxing ambiance to our living space. It has a glass door on the front so we can watch the flames as we cozy up under a blanket on a chair nearby reading a book to Little A. But the best thing about our woodstove is the double role it serves in our house. Not only does it provide warmth, it offers another cooking option in addition to our standard electric range in the kitchen.

For a number of years I’ve used the wood stove for simple cooking purposes. If I needed to melt butter for a recipe, I placed the butter in a metal bowl or pan and sat it on top of the wood stove to melt. If I wanted hot water for tea, I placed a teapot full of water on the stove to heat up. On days we had venison brats for dinner, we put them in a cast iron skillet placed on the wood stove top and fried them up. I never really thought about cooking more foods or even a full meal on the wood stove until last winter. That’s when I read this post by Trayer Wilderness on how to bake bread on a wood stove. I was so inspired! My first attempt at wood stove baking was dinner rolls. They turned out so delicious! 

Baking and Cooking a chicken dinner on a wood stove | Montana Homesteader

 Cooking Leftovers on the Wood Stove

On days when I am warming up frozen left overs for our evening meal, I place the frozen food in a stainless steel pot with a lid and sit it on the wood stove to thaw and warm up. How fast your food cooks depends on how hot your stove is burning. When our stove is burning on high and really kicking out a lot of heat, it cooks food quite quickly but can also burn food on the bottom of the pan. In this scenario, I find it easier to sit the pot on a metal trivet on top of the stove. This allows the food to warm up without burning on the bottom. 

Baking a Chicken on a Wood Stove

Unlike baking in a standard oven, baking on a wood stove has more variations and requires you to be attentive and make adjustments according to how hot the wood stove is. Baking a chicken on a wood stove isn’t as simple as putting the roasting pot in the electric oven and knowing it will be done in a set amount of time. Although it requires a bit more attention from you, the end result of a delicious chicken roasted on top of the wood stove with no electricity is well worth the time and effort! 

At 11am on a Sunday morning I put a raw, whole chicken in our favorite enameled cast iron pan. I stuffed the inside of the chicken with a chopped onion and several cloves of chopped garlic. I sprinkled salt, pepper, garlic powder and thyme on the chicken. Then I poured in 1/2 cup of water, put the lid on and sat the pan on the wood stove. I didn’t use any of our cast iron dutch ovens that we use for outdoor cooking since they all have legs to sit over hot coals and we wanted the pan to sit directly on the stove (at least for a little while). Initially I stuck our magnetic thermometer on the side of the roasting pan(this is the handy gadget we usually have on the wood stove pipe to gauge the heat intensity that I  wrote about in this post or you can find them here). This was helpful to get an idea of how hot the pan was when sitting directly on the wood stove and when it was sitting up on a trivet.Using a magnetic woodstove thermometer to gauge the heat of a roasting pan when baking a chicken on a wood stove | Montana Homesteader

Once the pan heated up to over 350 degrees, I sat it on a cast iron trivet on the stove. The day warmed up and we turned the woodstove down. The temperature in the chicken dropped so I put the pan directly back on the top of the wood stove and that was our sweet spot to bake the chicken. It finished baking after six hours. The house smelled delicious! 

How to bake a chicken on a wood stove | Montana Homesteader

Baking Potatoes in a Wood Stove

I wrapped several homegrown potatoes in tin foil and placed them on top of the coals in the wood stove. The key to baking and not burning the potatoes is to make sure the coals are hot but not the raging bright orange/red coals that will burn your potato quicker than it will bake the inside. Just like cooking over a campfire outside, I like to make a bed of coals off to the side of the main fire to cook the food. In our wood stove, I can easily do this by using our homemade metal poker to push the burning logs to one side of the fire box and move some of the hot coals to the other side for the potatoes.Baking potatoes inside a wood stove | Montana Homesteader

How long to bake the potatoes depends on how big your potatoes are and how hot the coals are. After placing the potatoes on the coals, use tongs to flip them over every 10- 15 minutes to make sure one side doesn’t burn and they bake evenly. After the first 15 minutes of baking, I check the potatoes to see if they are done and then check them about every 5-10 minutes after since I really don’t like burnt potatoes! To check to see if they are done, I simply use a fork and poke them through the foil. 

Cooking Side Dishes on a Wood Stove

If the wood stove is on low, I typically sit the stainless steel pot of food directly on the wood stove until it is cooked. If the wood stove is burning quite hot, I sit the pan up on a cast iron trivet so the food doesn’t burn. When cooking food like pasta, I sit the pot of water directly on the wood stove to boil. The wood stove needs to be burning hot to be able to boil the water quickly, otherwise I’ve learned the hard way it can take close to an hour to boil a pot of water if the wood stove is on low. Once I add the pasta to the boiling water, I either turn the wood stove down to a lower heat or put the pot on a cast iron trivet on the stove top to finish cooking without boiling over. 

Steaming vegetables on a Wood Stove

Anytime I have vegetables to steam, like winter squash, I use my large steamer pot on the wood stove. I used to chop up and steam winter squash in the electric oven but it takes a long time and often dries the squash out a bit. Now I chop the winter squash in half, scoop out the seeds and chop the squash into chunks. The chunks of squash are placed in the top pan of the steamer pot with an inch or two of water in the bottom pot. I put a lid on top, sit the steamer pot on the wood stove if it is running on low or on a trivet on the wood stove if it is burning super hot. The squash steams nicely in about half the time it would take in the oven and I used no electricity in the process. When it is done I can easily peel and puree the squash to use in one of our favorite recipes like this delicious squash soup. Just this last weekend I steamed a homegrown squash on our wood stove and we also warmed some of our honey we harvested in the fall that crystallized.

Steaming vegetables and warming honey on the wood stove Montana Homesteader

I just love cooking and baking food on our wood stove! I appreciate knowing that our beloved wood stove has a dual purpose in our home to not only heat the house to keep us warm but can cook and bake a full meal! One day this fall we were without power for a day and it was reassuring to know that I could easily still keep our home warm and cook our family’s meals on the wood stove that day. While I love baking and cooking on a wood stove for fun, it is a handy survival skill to have for those times we have no electricity in the house!

Baking and Cooking a chicken dinner on a wood stove | Montana Homesteader

Do you like to cook and bake on the wood stove? What tips or recipes do you have to share? 

 

Pin on Pinterest
Pinterest
Share on Facebook
Facebook
Tweet about this on Twitter
Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Linkedin
Share on Yummly
Yummly

More Homesteading Inspiration

5 tips to safely eat and salvage roadkill meat

Safely Eating and Salvaging Roadkill meat

Curried Carrot Soup Recipe

Perfect easy peel farm fresh hard boiled eggs Montana Homesteader

Perfect Easy Peel Hard Boiled Farm Fresh Eggs

DIY chicken bouillon powder from scratch

Homemade Chicken Bouillon Powder Recipe

Dutch Baby German Pancake recipe with fresh fruit and powdered sugar topping

Dutch Baby German Pancake Recipe

Traditional Thanksgiving bread stuffing

Traditional Classic Bread Stuffing Recipe

Honey sweetened raw cranberry orange relish salad

Raw Cranberry Orange Relish with Honey

Homemade pumpkin pie made with fresh pumpkin

Homemade Fresh Pumpkin Pie Recipe

Plate of delicious homemade sourdough pumpkin muffins

Sourdough Pumpkin Muffins Recipe

making sourdough starter from scratch with wild yeast

Easy Sourdough Starter Recipe

A bowl of crispy crunchy and delicious kale chips Montana Homesteader blog

How to make Crispy Crunchy Kale Chips

Huckleberry lemonade recipe | Montana Homesteader

Huckleberry Lemonade

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Don

    January 17, 2016 at 11:33 pm

    What a nice article. I am always interested in articles that provide insight into homestead details, and this one is fills that role perfectly. Next time with chicken– add 1/2 of an orange to the inside cavity along with the garlic, and try herbs de provence instead of just thyme. Half way and 3/4 the way through baste with 1/4 cup white wine each time and see what happens. Homestead magic!

    Reply
    • Montana Homesteader

      January 18, 2016 at 6:49 am

      Thanks for sharing another way to roast a chicken! I’m planning to roast another chicken on our wood stove this next week so will have to give your method a try- it sounds delicious!

      Reply
  2. Linda

    March 26, 2016 at 4:39 am

    I make vegetable based soups on our wood stove and things like dhal ( Indian lentil dish ). We have a top cooler ledge and a bottom hot ledge, so I juggle the pots between the ledges for temperature control 🙂

    Reply
  3. Terry Carter

    February 1, 2018 at 12:48 pm

    Hi,
    Thanks for the nice post. Another way to even out the heat on your woodstove suface is to use a pan sized piece of soapstone as a trivet. They give nice even heat quite awhile after the stove cools down, and moderate high temperatures extremely well.
    Woodstock Soapstone company is one source close to me, not sure about your area. It’s mined in Vermont.
    Terry

    Reply
  4. Nanette

    February 25, 2019 at 8:28 am

    Loved your articles regarding homesteading and living off the grid. I live high in the NC mountains and in the same farmhouse since we came up here 20 years ago. I have since divorced, but have my house and recently bought a HECO wood cookstove from Obadiahs in Kalispell. I am going to restructure my entire kitchen around this, to make this room a country kitchen. I have heated my house with wood for years with a Carolina water stove which heats water for a system that heats the house (radiators). This takes electricity.
    Starting my new life at 67, alone and unafraid as a homesteader. Looking forward to my new wood-cookstove which will also heat my whole house. My grandmother lived 17 miles from town in the Illinois prairie and lived on canned goods that she made. I admired this, I think that am the only one that did out of 13 grandchildren, but want to continue this for my own use and for my own children, even tho their interest is not that pertinent right now. But, it will catch on, this I do know. Enjoyed the article on cooking on your woodstove. great ideas.
    Thank you for your blog. So interesting. Great reading. Envy you for taking the herbal class. Good luck.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recipe Rating




This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Hello I'm Annie and welcome to our blog!

I was raised in an old farmhouse in the country and taught by three generations of women in my family to cook from scratch, can and preserve food, nurture plants to grow, craft with my hands, and live a simple, meaningful life. Now I'm teaching my own children these skills on our little homestead in Montana. I'm sharing these vintage skills here so you too can live a simple, more connected homemade life- one canning jar at a time! Read more...

Site Footer

Some of the posts on this website contain affiliate links. This means I receive a small commission when a product is purchased through these links at no additional cost to you. Montana Homesteader  participates in the Amazon Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for your support!

Follow Montana Homesteader

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Home
  • About
  • Shop
  • Newsletter
  • Homesteading Resources
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2022 Montana Homesteader · All Rights Reserved · Powered by Mai Theme