I love cooking on the woodstove. It is a wonderful stove top and saves on running the conventional range-top burner. I have a step-top woodstove and after some testing, I have found the heat levels for cooking on it. If I have a gentle fire going as shown in the photo, the lower level is medium to high heat temperature. This is a good location for starting a pot of soup or stew to get it boiling. Check your pot often as the heat can be very hot and you don’t want to burn your food or boil over the pot.

Once I have my pot of soup hot, I move it up on top for low heat cooking. I can leave my pot of soup simming here for hours. Do check the heat if you build up your fire as it can still get pretty hot on this top shelf of a woodstove.

I find if my soup pot gets too cold, I can always move the pot to the lower level to get the pot hot again and I do this also before serving the soup.

All woodstoves vary and cooking on them takes some time and testing to perfect your skills. My main advice is to check your pot often until you have a good feel for how hot the pot gets depending on the amount of fire and wood you have going in your stove. Using a trivet is also a good way to control the amount of heat on your stove top.

It is very useful to learn how to cook on a woodstove especially in a power outage or other off-the-grid situations. I also have cooked things inside the woodstove such as in this baking potatoes in a woodstove post.

Learning new skills such as cooking on a woodstove or even inside it can be very important. Not only can it be a useful prepping skill but an excellent way to have a hot meal should you be faced with emergency situation.