Dutch Oven Learning Blog

Lesson 4 - Meat Entrees - It's All About the Marinade!
For this week's lesson, David, focused on how to cook an entree. He had us try making a tri-tip roast, smoked salmon, and roasted chicken. We cooked all of the meats (except for the salmon) via the Dutch oven and charcoals. We cooked the salmon via the Dutch oven which was then place inside of a conventional oven. All three meats turned out well. In fact, I LOATHE eating fish, and I actually thought the salmon turned out well--I would even consider eating it again. (Trust me, that is saying a lot).
During this lesson, I found an additional learning buddy beyond my husband--Arlene. I "took" to Arlene because she was able to explain things on a level that I could understand. David really knows his stuff, but he doesn't always "unpack" things in a way that I can understand. Both David and Arlene have degrees in culinary arts, but Arlene's degree; and therefore experience, is much more recent than David's (probably by like 20 or so years). So, I found myself really engaged in this week's lesson as I asked Arlene questions about cooking in general. I found myself really beginning to understand some major principles and concepts of cooking.
Personal Learning Experience - Chicken and Southwest Style Potatoes
I decided to try roasting a whole chicken (like we did in our lesson) along with a side of potatoes for my personal learning experience this week. The potatoes were easy and I cooked them in the Dutch oven via the Camp Chef stove. I used a frozen package of Potatoes O'brian, Campbell's cheddar cheese soup, and bacon. (I learned from both David and Arlene that bacon grease is a great way to flavor food when cooking and can frequently be used in place of cooking oil when working with meats--not necessarily the healthiest substitution, but definitely tasty.) I sailed through this part of the cooking. Setting up the camp chef stove, hooking up the propane and cooking the potatoes--which was just like cooking on my glass stove top when I use a conventional oven. No problems with transfer here, except in one area--preheating the Dutch oven. Luckily my husband was with me and remembered the need to preheat.
Then it came time for the cooking of the chicken. Now this was a whole chicken so the body of the bird was still intact, even the backbone. I had to learn how to remove the gizzard, cut out the backbone and break the breast bone of the chicken. (My husband had to take over with the final removal of the backbone--I couldn't get that darn thing to come completely out!) Then I had to make sure and clean it really well. Once the chicken was cleaned, I poked several small holes in the body of the chicken with my knife. (David says this allows for the marinade to seep into the whole meat versus the outside surface.) I placed the chicken in a bowl and filled it with Italian Salad Dressing as a marinade sauce. (Note: 24 hours of marinade is recommend for best results, and don't ever cook in or baste the meat with the sauce used for marination--that is a recipe for food poisoning.) I then placed the chicken in the preheated Dutch oven that also had bacon cooked in it for an oil base and cooked it (the whole chicken) for 2 hours via charcoal. It probably was done after an hour and a half to an hour and forty minutes but turned out beautiful despite the small overage of cooking time. (Note: You must cook the chicken to at least 165 degrees to avoid food poisoning.)
On a fun note, my husband and I roasted marshmallows (which turned into s'mores) over the coals while we waited for the chicken to cook - never hurts to start dinner with dessert now, does it? (Pictures of personal learning experience posted below.)
Learning Theory Connections:
Ok, so I felt so much more confident in my cooking than I have as of yet. Why? Well, I can feel the schema building. I know how to set things up, hook up the propane, light the charcoal, etc. It's all occurring with atuomaticy now. I didn't even have to do a "quick check" with my husband. I just did it. At some point, I realized that cooking the potatoes in the Dutch oven on the propane stove was no different than cooking them on the glass top of my conventional stove. So, now I've chunked this information right into my conventional stove top cooking schema. How is that for long term knowledge ready for retrieval at a moments notice when I need it? I am not sure why it took me so long to connect with and assimilate that knowledge.
In terms of cooking a whole chicken, I have never done this before. But, I have cleaned and cooked a turkey a couple of times before. As I started the process of preparing the chicken, I even said out loud to my husband, "Oh, this is like preparing the turkey at Thanksgiving." Another assimilation in to my schema of cooking. I was even standing exactly where I stand when I prepare the turkey for Thanksgiving dinner and I could see such event (preparing the turkey) happening in my "mind's eye." Perhaps some episodic memories and encoding specificity due to the physical context of the situation went on here.
Finally, Vygotsky's social learning theory is at work here. David, who has a degree and more than 40 years in culinary art experience and is more of an expert at Dutch oven cooking (he has won many awards), really has a hard time "unpacking" cooking concepts. He forgets to explain cooking terms and often leaves out steps in his directions and recipes. If he forgets to bring an ingredient with him to the lesson, he tells us to make an "appropriate" substitution, but forgets to identify possible appropriate substitutions. Arlene is more of an intermediate level when it comes to cooking. She has a degree in culinary arts and is passed the novice stage, but she was able to bring concepts down into my zone of proximal development. I could feel my ability to take what I already knew about cooking and reach just a little bit to grasp something new that David had said by asking Arlene about it. I became comfortable in my learning. I found out things I didn't know before like poking holes in the meat helps to assist in a more thorough marination or learning required temperatures of cooking different meats. All of this occurred because Arlene "unpacked" the expertise of it all for me.