COOKING WITH GRANDMA’S CAST IRON COOKWARE A SERIES OF ARTICLES ABOUT REFURBISHING AND USING CASTIRON BY LARRY & BETTY HARMON Part four- cooking with cast iron, applying heat evenly to top and bottom Needing to apply heat to the top and the bottom at the same time is almost exclusively a Dutch oven thing. For example when coking corn dodgers, it is usually a cast iron frying pan that is used and the dodger is turned as needed with a fork or spatula. Here is a look at cooking corn dodgers over a campfire. Dutch oven cooking however seems to need a bit more heat on the bottom and a bit less on the top. Our rough rule of thumb for most recipes is about one fourth less coals on the top. Only time and experience will get it perfected to suit your old traditional family recipes. In this short video Betty is putting the corn bread batter in the pre heated Dutch oven. After adding the batter, the lid is put in place and the charcoal is put on the oven lid. The charcoal on the Dutch oven bottom is on a sheet of aluminum foil because we didn’t have a good dry layer of ash in our fire pit. We were having daily spring time showers and the foil directed the heat up to the Dutch oven instead of being wicked away by the damp ground. Though not quite done yet, here is our first peek at our corn bread. As you can see in these short videos it is a fairly simple process and the even distribution of heat makes for well browned and delicious campfire corn bread !