Peat as oven fuel??

[Echo Weaver]

I recently brought home a few stacks of peat and discovered that you can't use it in the clay oven?? 

There's a mod for this (of course), but I hope it's a planned fix in vanilla because that is just weird.

(Unless there's some technical reason that it's a good simulation not to use this fuel to cook bread?)

[Thorfinn]

It's really easy to overheat a stone oven just using wood. I have no IRL experience with burning peat, but if it's really 200C hotter, seems to me it would hard to avoid a burned crust over raw dough.

[EDIT]

I do, however, have real life experience with putting coal in a wood stove. It's not pretty. Cast iron is fine, but don't attempt it in steel.

Edited November 22, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Bumber]

6 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

It's really easy to overheat a stone oven just using wood. I have no IRL experience with burning peat, but if it's really 200C hotter, seems to me it would hard to avoid a burned crust over raw dough.

You can cook with latent heat. Just let the temperature fall back down first, assuming a single piece of peat burns long enough to heat the oven that much to begin with.

(Does the oven stay at a fixed temp for a while and then suddenly start rapidly dropping? IIRC, smelting works that way, but I forget about ovens. It's not particularly realistic.)

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, Bumber said:

Does the oven stay at a fixed temp for a while and then suddenly start rapidly dropping?

It slowly drops from whenever the fire burns out. I suppose you could set things such that, say, 4 pieces of peat or 3 of coal/charcoal brought it up to the same temperature as 6 pieces of firewood. OK, fine. Don't care one way or the other, except that "realism" means that the rate of temperature gain between wood, peat and charcoal (and whatever someone else wants next week) needs to be tweaked, which will affect pretty much everything else, like cooking, smelting, etc.

Again, don't really care. I'd much rather have an oven with a higher latent heat than one that accepts multiple fuels.

[LadyWYT]

I've always just shoved firewood into the oven and then cooked whatever I needed to. If the temperature got a bit low, I just shoved more wood in to heat it back up. Peat I generally burn on the pit kilns, to warm myself up, to preheat a crucible, or cook in a cookpot.

[Grummsh]

And i know its just a game but it would be kinda yuck to bake bread or a pie after burning peat to get the tempreture up i believe the smell would be there still  

[Krougal]

16 hours ago, Grummsh said:

And i know its just a game but it would be kinda yuck to bake bread or a pie after burning peat to get the tempreture up i believe the smell would be there still  

Pairs well with Scotch?

 

[Grummsh]

6 hours ago, Krougal said:

Pairs well with Scotch?

 

Well I guess we have peat, barrels, maybe not barley but some other grains could be used i guess. Whiskey it is then!

[Khornet]

Peat is literally just dirt with decaying organic matter. Why would you put your bread into where that's been?

[Echo Weaver]

1 minute ago, Khornet said:

Peat is literally just dirt with decaying organic matter. Why would you put your bread into where that's been?

You cook meals with it. Is that so different?

[Khornet]

1 minute ago, Echo Weaver said:

You cook meals with it. Is that so different?

I case you haven't noticed, the clay oven in VS is traditional type in that it is heated by burning the wood inside of it on the same surface area the food is placed on.
I wouldn't wanna place my raw bread dough on the residue left over by burning stinking, filthy peat, and you shouldn't either.

The meals cooked in the firepit are either in a pot or, in the case of roasting meat, hanging a certain distance above the firepit (on a magically materializing firepit rotisserie).

[Echo Weaver]

What's left will be ash, but

I installed the mod. It makes peat more useful and worth collecting, and it also makes what-burns-where simpler. To each their own.

[Thorfinn]

Peat bogs tend to be quite high in iron. It's that iron sulfide that gives burning peat its offensive odor. Like the guy who installed a permanganate filter on the water supply in one of my former homes put it, you turn on the water and it's like someone farted in your face. I wouldn't know, but I suspect it's not too far from the truth.

That said, so what? A game can be too faithful to reality. Enjoy the mod, @Echo Weaver.

[Kevin Eric Snell]

Or maybe add an upgraded "multi-fuel" type stove that can burn firewood or peat and doesn't use the configuration of the more basic clay oven. (I was going to suggest burning peat in ovens, but searched & found this thread first)

[Thorfinn]

Dana Tweaks does/did that. According to the author, the stove's graphics are hardcoded, so no matter what fuel you use, it looks like firewood. If that doesn't bother you, that's an option.