No Oven, No Problem

We got a new toy in OurRamblinVan. We’re relearning to bake with our brand-new Omnia Stove Top Oven. Last night’s sausage pizza was so yummy, even though it looked like a giant pizza doughnut. We used a premade refrigerated pizza dough, about a half cup of pizza sauce, about a half pound of cooked Italian sausage and half a packet of Italian blend shredded cheese. If I had it to do again, I might halve the pizza crust. It got a little thick.

The tricky part about using the Omnia Oven is the actual baking, without a temperature control knob like a regular oven, baking like this is really just a guessing game. We do have a thermometer that pokes into a vent hole and reads the internal temp at the top of the lid, so that helps a little. The instructions in the little booklet that came with the oven say that as soon as the internal oven temp gets up to what the recipe calls for, the food should cook for the same amount of time as the recipe calls for from that point on. What we have found so far is that the little thermometer never actually gets up to the temp stated in the recipe, but you can smell when the food is beginning to cook, or overcook. We also found that if the wind is blowing, (and when isn’t it when you are trying to cook outside?) the oven needs to be rotated on the burner now and then to even out the cooking. It’s an imprecise science, but did our forebearers give up on biscuits just because they were tricky to cook in a woodstove? Heck no. We’re made of pioneer stock, why couldn’t we do this? We have not actually tried biscuits yet so, be with me great-great-Grandma.

Research shows it takes 6-20 tries to master a new thing. We have a way to go. Watch for some Omnia recipes to pop up here and there as we continue to master What’s Cookin’ Our Ramblin Van Style.

Bon Appetit