The Rest of Your Kit: Gloves, Lifter, Chimney, Table
Besides the oven itself you need four things, and none of them are as optional as people hope. Gloves, a lid lifter, a charcoal chimney, and something to set the oven on that isn't the dirt. Let's take them one at a time.
Gloves, not oven mitts
This is the one I get pushback on. People bring their kitchen oven mitts and want to use those. Don't.
You want actual welding-style leather gloves — the long-cuff kind — or real fireplace/coal gloves. Oven mitts are built for oven-temperature heat and a couple seconds of contact. Coals are a different animal: they stay hot a long, long time, and you'll be reaching over and around them, not grabbing a handle once. A thin quilted mitt lets heat through before you know it's happening. Leather gloves run about fifteen bucks. Get them before your first cook, not after you've regretted skipping them.
A lid lifter
A metal hook made specifically to grab the lid by its little handle loop and lift it straight up and off — no touching anything hot with your fingers, no tipping ash into the food. You can improvise with pliers once. You won't want to twice.
And a rule that came straight out of a dumb mistake: the lid lifter does not sit wherever near the coals when you're not using it. I burned two fingers grabbing one that had been resting on the edge of a hot lid for twenty minutes — small blister, stupid, completely avoidable. So now I tell every class: the lifter lives on the table, or hanging off something, never propped against the oven "just for a second." That's a real rule, not a suggestion.
A charcoal chimney
The metal cylinder you fill with briquettes and light from underneath with newspaper or a couple of fire-starter cubes. It gets your coals uniformly lit in about fifteen minutes, no lighter fluid — which I don't want near my food anyway. Skip the lighter fluid. It's slower and messier than people think and it can leave a taste. The chimney's worth the ten dollars.
A table or stand
You want the oven up off the ground, on something stable, at a height where you're not bending over a bed of coals to check on it. A folding table works. A dedicated Dutch oven stand works better if you do this a lot — it holds the oven at a good working height and keeps the whole rig from tipping.
What you don't want: the oven balanced on rocks or a cooler lid that can slide. And don't set it directly on a wooden picnic table without something underneath — coals radiate more heat sideways and down than people expect.
The part nobody wants to hear: cleanup tools
Cleanup is the real skill here, more than the cooking is, and it gets its own small kit: a scraper or plastic scrubber, a rag, and oil for reseasoning after. I'll teach cleanup properly in its own lesson, but the opinion fits here: soap is fine. A little dish soap on a well-seasoned pan, followed by a good dry and a light coat of oil, will not strip your seasoning. The "never use soap" rule is a holdover from the lye-soap era. Plain dish soap beats scrubbing chicken grease off with nothing but water and hope.
What I actually care about is drying it fully. I left a cast iron pan wet on the counter overnight once, during a week I wasn't thinking about much beyond band schedules, and by morning it had flash-rusted — a whole orange bloom across the bottom, in one night, because our air here pulls moisture out fast in a way that then lets rust set in just as fast on bare metal. I scrubbed it back to bare iron with steel wool and reseasoned it three separate times before it looked right again. That's my go-to "don't do this" story, because it's such an easy mistake and such an annoying fix.
So: dry it completely, right after washing, every time. Rag first, then a couple minutes over low heat if you want to be sure, then a thin wipe of oil while it's still a little warm.
Putting it together
For your first cook, the kit is: leather gloves, lid lifter, chimney, a stable table or stand, and a scraper plus rag plus oil for after. That's it. No fancy carrying case, no dedicated cast iron seasoning spray, none of the stuff that fills gift sets. Basic tools, used the right way, every time.
Before next time: if you don't already have gloves and a lid lifter, pick those up — everything else in this class assumes they're in hand.