Cookin' With Coal

scalabro wrote:
It's a good thing you live far away from me, or you'd have a coalie mooching dinner!

You wouldn't be the first !

9 pm and it's already dropped down in the 40's outside. The range has the house nice and warm while it did a great job of cooking dinner. Sweet Italian sausage, fried up with potato's, onions and garlic. Fried zucchini and tomatoes. Plus, boiled corn on the cob and squash.

Paul

Dude, your killing me.

Sawsage en peppas is my favorite.

scalabro wrote:Dude, your killing me.

Sawsage en peppas is my favorite.

Well, there's a good way to relieve the pain ....... with a coal range in your kitchen !!!!!


Paul

Well, yesterday was not just special because of the first lighting of the range for this season, it was my first chance to see how the new grates work.

When I bought the range one grate was warped. Since they are geared together that meant that neither grate could be rotated as they should.

The triangular coal grates are "great" for a number of reasons.

1. The triangular teeth grind up any clinkers that may be starting to form in the bottom of the firebox. Without being able to do that a poker has to be used up through the teeth gaps to break them up and loosen during shaking.

2. Having one set of the triangular teeth always extending down into the primary air it helps cool the grates .

3. Being able to shed more heat into the incoming air, the triangular grates do more preheating of it and thus help improve burn efficiency.

4. Having three surfaces that can be rotated into use will even out the wear and extend the life of the grate set.

After ten hours of burn time over night, this morning would be my first test of using the grates the way they were designed.

I loaded and damped down the range last night at 9 pm. Woke up at 7 am to the thermometer showing 42 degrees outside - not as cold as I guessed by yesterday's weather reports.

The kitchen was 70 degrees and the large kettle full of water was nice and hot - just below a boil.

Opened up the dampers and in the few minutes that it takes for me to make a cup of instant coffee, the range was up to full cooking temps.

Time to shake ashes and reload. After nine years with a warped grate that prevented the grates from being turned to clear ash, I was a bit hesitant.

I put the shaker handle on at 12 o'clock and turned it clockwise to the 4 o'clock position until the handle hook contacted the stop pin. I was greeted with the feeling of the grates softly and quietly crunching through coal ash. Looking in through the ash door I could see plenty of glow down through the grates so I knew all the bottom ash was gone. All the ash was nicely burned to white ash. No signs of any unburned bits.

A few couple of short, gentile shakes of the handle back and forth and brought a few small burning bits down so I knew that was all that was needed.

I looked in the top of the firebox and the coal bed had hardly dropped. Checking with the newly restored poker showed that there was no bridging and that the bed had settled nicely onto the grates with just a few shakes.

So, as Glenwood advertises in their range brochures about these triangular coal grates, they do grind up and clear any beginnings of clinkers and there's no more need to poke at the grates.

Cookin' with coal just got even sweeter !

Many thanks to Wilson for helping to make this happen !!!!!

Paul

Good to hear the grates a working! That will make the daily ritual much easier and cleaner.

I started the coal fire in my cook stove a couple days ago. No really fancy meals on her yet...just frozen pizza and roasted chicken so far.

Got down to 33° last night so have really good draft today. Heated water for laundry and now she is drying it! Nice to have coal season starting again.

I am going to take some photos showing the changes I made out in the garage. Much easier cooking out there with the new changes.

Randy

Yeah, it's nice having the coal range running again. No more waiting for the gas stove to heat the kettle, no more running the dryer !

The new triangular grates are working terrific !

It's only taken a few days to figure out how long to go between times to rotate them, or if they just need a bit of a shaking instead.

Takes a couple of 1/3 turns in the morning and all the over-night ash buildup is cleared. Maybe one turn in early afternoon, and one at night.

They do a wonderful job of clearing ash. I can hear/feel them grinding it up when any clinker-like ash is trying to build up.

Another plus is with not having the bottom of the fire box slowly load up with burnt out clinkers after a few weeks, that the poker can't dislodge. With the new grates the firebox has more coal that is burning and producing heat. So, the range is not only putting out more heat, it's a more constant output too.

A bit of irony. Now that I finally got around to restoring the fire poker this summer, I've only had to rake along the outer most gap once since we started the stove up a week ago.

Paul

I am so envious of you guys with coal ranges. I want one.............and my wife does also (I still can't believe she told me that). But with the way my house is designed, I can't justify it.

What's for dinner Sunday, and what's your address?

scalabro wrote:What's for dinner Sunday, and what's your address?

That's quite the commute for a meal. I can save you the traveling back and forth and give you the address of where some nice coal ranges are for sale. Then you can enjoy the warmth and a coal range cooked meal all the time.

Paul

I am envious. I got a bead on a coal AGA in VT (back to my childhood) but there is no way I can use or install it. This stupid house has a wooden floor in the kitchen it would just fall through as this model has to weight 1300#. Oh well, back to my one pot at a time #9 recipe book. Not quite the same thing.

My dream kitchen would be Glenwood M (2 little old people), GE Advantium (220V model) flash cooker and a microwave. That way I would blow propain off the property.

Well,... the new coal grates are making things even better in ways I hadn't thought about.

After a few weeks of constant running, the slow build up of dead ash/clinkers on the grate bars, and the resulting lowering of heat output, made it tough to get high temps in the oven. Now, that I can rotate the grates daily we get the full potential of the range. That, coupled with sealing the oven and cook top joints last winter, we now have no problem getting the oven temps higher than we need.

Recently, I found info about baking bacon. The strips of bacon are placed on a cooking rack that is sitting in a shallow rectangular baking pan. I had my doubts as to how crisp it would get, but the cook assured me, many restaurants cook it this way and it works. What makes this method even better is how the coal range's oven works compared to a conventional gas, or electric stove oven.

As anyone who has done it knows, frying bacon causes a lot of spatter, smoke, and mess to clean up. With no kitchen exhaust fan, occasionally it could get noisy with the smoke alarm going off about the time that the bacon was ready.

And while the bacon grease spatters help the rust prevention of the cook top, since the cook top is very hot all over, the spatters also burn adding even more to the smoke level. We use one of those frying pan screen covers, but they only work when they are on the pan. There's still plenty of spatters while adding/removing, or turning the bacon over.

So, last night we tried baking it for making BLT sandwiches. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was even more uniformly crispy than if it had been fried. It was not near as greasy, tasted every bit as good, and it stayed nice and flat. Perfect for making BLT sandwiches.

At 425F in the oven, the baking temp does not have to be as high as the fry pan does to get the bacon crisp, so, there was no spatters inside the oven to clean up. And, with the same heat all around the bacon, it is cooked more evenly.

Having the bacon up on a cooling rack lets the excess grease drip off into the pan. So, there was no need to use up a lot of paper towels to put the cooked bacon on to soak that excess grease off it.

The other things about using a coal range that are pluses for this method, .......

As I've mentioned previously, the oven is vented into the last bit of the range's flues, so there was zero smell even standing right at the range, ..... except if we opened the oven door to inspect. Even then there was no smoke at all. NONE, NADA, ZIP ! If we had cooked even a few pieces of it on the stove top, the bacon smell would go though out the house and linger for many hours.

And, while I don't have one, if we had used a kitchen exhaust fan, that would also be sucking heat out of the house along with the bacon smoke.

Because of the coal-fired range design of having the heat coming from the oven walls, there is no greasy fog condensing on oven surfaces to have to clean up.

I like that baking is faster. While the bacon takes a bit longer to cook in the oven than in a fry pan (20 minutes in the oven), overall it actually took much less time. The cooling rack holds the entire pound of bacon so we could cook all of the package at one time. Where as, with our large fry pan, we could only do about half a package at a time.

The time was much further reduced by not having to do as much clean up after. Nothing to clean up at the range and the pan and cooling rack both fit right into the dish washer.

Saving even more time, . . . I didn't have to get the step stool out to stop the smoke alarm.

Here's pix of the bacon right out of the oven after 20 minutes at 425F - every bit as good and crispy as if we had fried it.

Paul

coalnewbie wrote:I am envious. I got a bead on a coal AGA in VT (back to my childhood) but there is no way I can use or install it. This stupid house has a wooden floor in the kitchen it would just fall through as this model has to weight 1300#. Oh well, back to my one pot at a time #9 recipe book. Not quite the same thing.

My dream kitchen would be Glenwood M (2 little old people), GE Advantium (220V model) flash cooker and a microwave. That way I would blow propain off the property.

At about half that weight, maybe this range will work for ya ? I just posted this in the General section.

An all-season, all-in-one range with only about a four foot wide foot print. And the owner confirmed in an email that it has the triangular coal grates.

**Broken Link(S) Removed**

Paul

Well, we missed out going to the meet and greet. Melissa has had to work the past few weekends, but finally caught up on the work Saturday.

Since the weekend is so nice we went fishing,. I don't consider myself good at fishing, but she loves to go and she's good at it.

With such beautiful weather, the lake was busy. We were getting lots of nibbles but nothing really biting. We kept moving to try other spots. About the time I was ready to give up, WHAM ! A good strike. I was slowly working the fish in and it went down into the rocks. The pole was bent way over and I thought for sure the line was about to break, but I couldn't budge the fish. Letting out slack didn't free it up either. So, figuring I was about to loose some line and a cheap rubber worm, I just pointed the rod tip straight down the line to prevent snapping the pole and pulled. Popped the fish loose from the bottom and was fighting again as I brought it up.

No record setter, but still a decent sized big mouth bass. Big enough for dinner for two. Usually, I'm for catch and release, but since the coal range was running and she loves to cook on it, she insisted that we save this one for dinner.

So, after cleaning, stuffing, and coating it with a dressing that a late friend taught her keeps baked fish from drying out (a mayo, lemon, and garlic mix), into the range oven it went.

Yup, it was a wonderful day. Good weather, relaxing afternoon. And to top it all off, a very good dinner that was fresher and cheaper than store bought, baked in an oven less expensively than we could by modern means. Makes it all the better when we have fun while knowing that were saving money too.

Life is good !

Paul

I have been doing bacon that way for ages and works very well, granted not in a coal fired oven but no splatter or anything. I usually do extra as no trouble to do that and is great for use later in a salad or sandwich that is cold. Much less greasy as well. My Grandmother did it that way and save the grease for other uses. A real plus is no stovetop to clean though in your case wouldn't sort of lube and protect the cook top?

Baking bacon was new to me, but not the cook.

When I asked about that, she said she hasn't done it that way before because the oven would not get hot enough. Now that I sealed all the air leaks in the top, oven, and stack so that the oven is capable of the higher temps needed, she said that's the way she'll be cooking it from now on. She especially likes that the oven is vented into the stack so that the house doesn't fill up with bacon frying smoke and setting off the smoke alarm and then many hours after having the whole house smelling of stale bacon smoke. That oven vent system works so well, that you can only smell bacon cooking if you open the oven door and take a whiff right above it.

Yes, the bacon grease will help protect the stove top, but not as well as other things I've tried. And with repeated applications, it gets a crusty build up in spots not hot enough to burn it off. Another down side is it smokes about the most of anything I've used. It smokes so much that the cook top has to be done in stages requiring more time. If I recoat the entire cook top at one time , like frying a pound of bacon on the cook top, it will smoke so much that it is guaranteed to set off the smoke detector in the next room. And, burned bacon fat does not smell as good as cooking bacon.

In my search for a better top coating, Wilson showed me how he uses vegetable cooking oil on a rag to quickly wipe down the range top while it's still hot.

I'm finding that at the start of the season with a cold stove top, the method that has worked best for rust prevention and lasted the longest before needing recoating is,
1. A good wire wheel cleaning.
2. A thorough coating of the Meeco stove polish, let sit until well dry, then buffed with a terrycloth rag.
3. Then a heavy coating of vegetable oil, followed by wiping off any excess oil with paper towels.
4. An occasional re-wipe with veg oil when needed.

So far, the range has been going non-stop for two weeks. We've been doing all our water boiling, cooking, and baking on it since startup. It's only needed one more light oil coating since.

This combo has held up the best so far. Longer than just using stove polish, or oil by themselves.

And, the combo of the veg oil and Meeco does not have the smoke and strong, lingering smell like using bacon grease, or other stove polishes that I've tried.

Paul