Cooking Recipes

Campfire cooking is an essential outdoors skill, that requires a lot of practice and know how of using a fire to your advantage to cook your choosen food product.

There is mulitple ways of cooking on a fire from a frying pan, to a dutch oven to cooking straight on the coals. Knowing how to manipilate the fire heat and the tool used is an art and I am still learning the many ways of cooking. It takes a lot of practice to get the right amount of heat from the fire so you don't burn your food or under cook it. Having the knowledge for the wood thats best for cooking comes in very handy.

Oak is a very dense wood which means it burns for a long time and creates very hot coals, I love using oak when cooking stews for hours, using the dutch oven or hanging a piece of meat over the fire as the quanatity of oak logs lasts far longer than the same amount of pine logs.

Pine wood is very soft wood which means it doesn't last very long when burning, meaning you have to cut far more logs for the heat compared to a denser wood. It is toxic to cook straight on pine wood because of the resin inside it.

Dutch oven cooking:

• The dutch oven is a brillaint piece of kit which is very vesertile. It can cook almost anything inside it just like a normal oven back home. The dutch oven has to be hung or placed over a hot bed of embers and a selection of hot rocks should be on the lid to cook the top of what your cooking. For example a loaf a bread, the hot bed of embers beneath will cook the base and inside of the dough and the hot rocks on the lid with cook the top of the bread to make it crispy. It is a difficult tasks to get the right amount of heat to cook the contents inside.

Cooking on the coals

This is a very basic but smart way of cooking, especially if you don't carry many cooking utensils. Being able to control the fire and cook straight on a bed of embers is a great skill to master and requires a lot of attention. Moreover you can also use a rock to cook on once heated around the fire as they hold a lot of heat for cooking. Meats such as steak or eggs are great for cooking on rock.