A pit oven is a common way to cook food and is used the world over. The basic premise is that you dig a hole, line it with stones, light a fire in it, put your food in and cover it over.
We constructed our pit oven in 2012. We put in a concrete base and lined it with engineering bricks as we use it regularly and it saves us digging a new hole each time. You can see one of the bricks needs replacing now.
We typically build a criss cross fire in the pit oven. Let the fire build until you have a good blaze and keep adding fuel so that it stays that way for 30 minutes or so.
Start to add in rocks a few at a time, ensuring that they are non-porous. We use granite.
Add a few rocks at a time whilst simultaneously adding fuel. Keep doing this for about 90 minutes and then let the fire die down.
This time around we cooked a venison joint in a Dutch oven
Lay some strong sticks over the hole.
Put some canvas on top.
Place soil around the edges first.
And then cover the whole thing over. The more soil, the more insulation. Check to make sure taht you can’t see any smoke coming out anywhere. If some can escape then so can heat.
We left the venison joint in for about 3 hours. The great thing with a pit oven is that as soon as you close it over it’s cooling down, so you can’t really burn anything in it. So if you’re not sure how long to leave something, go for longer rather than shorter.
We ate the venison with roast potatoes and vegetables that we’d cooked in embers.
We cook in a pit oven on our 5 Day Bushcraft Course as well as the 2 Day IOL Bushcraft Competency Award course.
You can see photos from these courses on our Facebook page.
