G'day folks, Ben from Snowys. Today I'm talking to you about seasoning your camp
oven. I've got a couple of different types here today, the cast iron guys and
the spun steel guys - the process of seasoning them is the same for both.
You might ask the question about whether you need to season a camp oven that is pre-
seasoned, like these ones, not necessarily but it can't hurt to give it a clean and
season it with your own oil anyway. So the first thing you want to do,
particularly with the new camp oven is give it a good clean, so grab yourself a
scourer, some dishwashing liquid, get some hot water and give it a good clean. What
you want to do is get all the manufacturing materials off of these, so
you just got a nice clean bare steel, a bare cast iron camp oven. So on my used
camp oven here, I'll clean the inside, I'll probably give the outside a clean to be
honest with you, I haven't cleaned the outside of this one for a while but if it's
going into storage, it's a good idea to season the outside of the oven as well -
it stops rusting. So, yeah, grab your scourer, give it a good scrub on the
inside and the outside. So, to get started, what you need, obviously is your camp
oven, grab yourself some oil, some heat proof gloves - oven mitts or these leather
gloves, some paper towel to wipe the oil around and a heat source. Now that heat
source could be a hooded barbecue, is always a good idea because it has a hood
over the top that helps circulate the heat around the whole camp oven, but you
can also do it on a campfire. The first thing you want to do is if we're gonna
heat the oven up, put it on the campfire or put it in the BBQ at a low heat, just
to warm it up a little, so the whole thing, like this, insert onto the heat
source and just let it warm up. Once you've had your camp oven in the
barbecue or on the fire for five or ten minutes, just enough to get it warm, grab
your gloves, so you're not gonna burn yourself, take it off the heat source and
and you want to get your oil and we're going to rub oil all over the camp oven.
You want to focus on the inside more, so that's where we're going to put that
nonstick surface inside. The outside is more about rust prevention and that's
going to sit in the fire and burn off anyway, so it's this inside surface here
that you want to get a nice shiny nonstick surface on it. So you need your
oil, you'll need some paper towel, tip some oil inside and wipe the oil all
throughout a nice even, not too thin, low liberal coating.
You don't want it to be running right down into the bottom of the camp oven but a nice liberal
coating all over. So now we've got a nice even coat of oil all over our camp oven,
we're going to put it back on the heat source. If you've got a barbecue, wind it
right up full, leave it really high. Put your barbecue in the middle of the lawn
or something too because you can get a bit of smoke coming out with all the oil
burning off of it. Now you can tip it upside down in a barbecue, you can tip
this upside down, it helps water from pulling in underneath it, once again,
you can also leave it upright if you like. If it's on a campfire you're going
to have to leave it upright put the lid on, leave it upright like that. Either way
works, you just need to heat the whole oven up. So put it on the heat source and
you want to leave it there for 45 to 60 minutes just to bake away. After about 45
to 60 minutes sitting on the heat source, the inside of your camp oven should
have a nice black shiny coating on it, much like this pre-season one does here,
which is different from the outside of this one here. So this camp oven actually
needs another seasoning but you can see down in the corner here there is kind of
a shiny texture, that's kind of what we're trying to achieve all throughout
the camp oven to get this shiny oil texture throughout. Probably the most
important thing to remember with all your research and what's the right way
to season your camp oven is you can't really mess it up. If it didn't work the
first time, just wipe some more oil on there and do it again, until you get a
nice shiny nonstick surface. And remember to maintain it, each time you cook on it
before you cook on it, apply a layer of oil on there and heat it up, when you
finished, apply another layer of oil, that's maintaining the nonstick surface
on it. One of the things you'll commonly read
about is people saying never to wash your camp oven in soapy water. It's not
entirely true, I've done it for years with mine on the inside in particular, if
you've got a good nonstick seasoned surface on the inside there's no harm in
using a warm cloth with soapy water to give it a clean, I wouldn't recommend
submerging it in water though. The most important thing is to make sure you dry
it, particularly before storage. So once you've washed it, maybe stick it back on
the fire for a minute or in the barbecue for a little bit, just to dry it right
out and when you do store it, make sure that you don't just oil the inside but
on the outside as well, particularly if it's in a moist environment and you're
storing it for a long time. Now, this whole process applies to all cast iron
cookware - fry pans, jaffle irons, all your skillets and you can even season
your trivet that goes inside the camp oven if
you like - same process, just oil it and stick it inside the camp oven while you're
seasoning the camp oven itself. So, that's the basics of seasoning your camp oven,
it's not a scary process, it's straightforward,
you can't really mess it up, you're just baking a layer of oil on the inside of
your camp oven. We've got a range of these at Snowys, all of ours are
pre-seasoned. Check it out at
www.snowys.com.au
Free delivery, just about anywhere in Australia
Lowest prices everyday.
Thanks for watching, guys.
We'll see you next time.