Aluminum Dutch Oven Meltdown
Doug,
If you have not been burning food in the iron oven, you're probably going to be OK with aluminum. But for what it's worth...40 years ago as a Boy Scout, I would cook cakes, brownies, and pies in my mother’s aluminum Dutch Oven. I would build the fire in advance, let it die down and put the Dutch Oven on/in the hot coals and put some coals on top. Pretty standard procedure I believe. My results were surprisingly good.
Then one day the coals I buried the pot in were too hot. I smelled my pie burning well before I thought it should have been finished cooking. I tried pulling the Dutch Oven out of the fire and it fell apart like it was made of Play Doe. It must have been just about to melt. Burning the pie did not surprise me too much, but destroying the oven sure did.
Since then I have only used an iron Dutch Oven. Now that I have traded my tent up to a TM, I will probably use the propane oven. But, if I were to go back to Dutch Oven cooking for the fun of it, I would hope my maturity would bring a better sense of how hot was too hot. Or use a system to judge the heat such as how many seconds I can hold my hand over it at a set distance. You may do something like that already to better control the oven temperature.
Bottom line, I would consider aluminum to save weight, but I would be careful not to get it too hot.
Jim
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