Engine ovens

No, I've not gone completely mad, and it isn't April yet. Every so often the subject of 'engine ovens' crops up - that is a metal box near the manifold that will quite literally cook a stew on the move. Over a short period it'll easily heat up your pasties or sausage rolls.

Surely this is something that would be of great use to overlanders. Anyone encounter an 'engine oven' before?

Not seen a commercially manufactured one, but have built a few over the years for cooking, and other similar items for heating rear heaters, screen washer bottles, and even for site water showers.

The problem was always excess heat locally, it often meant something was burned on one side and not on the other,

thats because its soo easy to do and with every differant meal you have a differant set up, i quite often strap a tin of chilli to the under side of the turbo on my 200TDI put a small hole in the lid and drive for 2 hours,
ive seen a series 3 with a 200tdi fitted with a specially built drop tray in the bit of metal under the centre set with enough room to drop in two tins of what ever

i have wrapped a steak in tin foil and strapped it there, didn't go so well

important to check no exhaust leaks near your food

This from the Expedition Portal may interest you.

Seems to be a very popular thing in the US.

Cheers

Quote :

thats because its soo easy to do and with every different meal you have a different set up

prooved wrong

it must be difficult to have "one fits all" as all are different

the most common one i hear about is using wire mesh to hold tin foil bags in place

i think the most ideal thing would be to convert to a steam engine then you could pour water from your engine into a cuppa tea
now that would be nice

A steam engine with cold water???

who puts cold water in to tea?

My Defender 300TDi does not have much space for an oven and the exhaust manifold is under the inlet manifold so there is not much room anyway.

A while ago I toyed with the idea of modifying a large vacuum flask, by using the vacuum part as a hot wtaer jacket. This would be done by welding a couple of stub pipes to the outside which would go into the engine coolant system so that the coolant would circulate through the vacuum jacket and cook stew or soup or whatever was inside where hot/cold drinks normally go. The vacuum flask shape could also be fitted in the gap between engine and washer bottle. The only problem was how to get so snap dry fittings so that I could take it in and out without losing coolant each time. Never did solve that last one, so the idea never did get built.

Of course, if as soup/stew cooker could be buiilt from a vacuum flask, the same principal could be applied to a shallow flat container for heating pies, foil coocking chicken.fish etc.

I also note that although the coolant does not get that hot, 80 degC should be enough to cook a lot of different foods, temperatures like that or less are widely used in the latest "sous-vide" water bath techniques in some restaurants.

I had a suzuki jimny and had an oven made for pasties and the likes whilst laning

here it is........


Someone then bought it from me and took it on the Mongol Rally.