Dutch Ovens And Fascinating Facts About Them - By: michael russell

Dutch ovens and fascinating facts about them tend to reveal a very famous, and historical, kind of cook pot that's been well-known in America and parts of Europe for centuries. Made of cast iron and featuring thick walls, it comes with a top that fit tightly over the open pot. It's still popular to this day and learning a bit about the oven might even prove to be somewhat entertaining.

The history of these ovens begins sometime in the 1600s, when the Dutch started creating certain versions of them based on designs of their own. The secret of the Dutch oven of that day was in not only the design but also the use of cast iron, and the Dutch eagerly began to export it to much of Europe and Great Britain. It was in that country, by the way, that it became extremely popular.

The British also began to look at the oven with an eye towards improving its design and manufacture, and they succeeded with their own specific creation, patenting it in 1708. They also were enthusiastic exporters of the oven, sending large numbers of it over to their American colonies, where they were eagerly snapped up by households all up and down the eastern seaboard.

Gradually, with the Americans being no slouches themselves when it came to innovation and design, certain changes to a Dutch oven appeared, including the addition of short legs on the bottom of the pot. This was to enable users of the pot to set it down on a bed of hot coals. As well, the pot itself became a bit shallower and the top was redesigned so that coals could be placed over it.

There was a special process, germane to most any pot or pan made with cast iron, used by American colonists (even to this day) to "season" the oven or pot made with the iron. People knew that the oven would come with bare iron, which meant that it needed to have some sort of coating placed within its cooking surfaces. It's this seasoning process that's unique to cast iron cookware, by the way.

People using a Dutch oven soon realized that adding a thin layer of animal or vegetable fat (the colonists, of course, used animal fat) helped greatly in keeping the pot from rusting and imparting poor-tasting elements to the food cooked within. The animal fat would be smeared over the surface and the pot or oven would be heated to bond the fat to the metal, basically.

This process of seasoning has survived pretty much unchanged to this day, and many owners of Dutch ovens believe in getting ovens made of bare cast iron so that their own special mixture of seasoning can be applied to them. Many also say that that's one of the pleasurable aspects of owning such an oven, which is still prized and still versatile in that it can cook, stew, fry and roast almost anything.

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