4 Types of Cooking On A Campfire - Boil it, Bake it, Fry It, Grill It Over the fire. - Dan Wowak

one of the best parts of recreating outside is cooking a good meal cooking good meal over a campfire is even better and that's one question we get asked all the time how do you properly cook a meal over a campfire lucky for you today i'm going to show you those skills we have a ton of videos in our blog section that lay out exactly how to get fire going and when it comes to a cooking fire i'm not too concerned with how you get it going but once it's going i have a lot of concern the reason why is because we want to cook on a certain type of wood if we can i mean there's going to be some circumstances in which you just absolutely cannot but technically what you want to cook on is something of hardwood nature not soft wood like pine or hemlock now i know what you might be thinking you think well i don't know enough about trees to be able to identify that but yes yes you do it's very very simple so when you go out and you're going to collect your wood just look at what kind of trees are around if they are trees that have green needles on them year round try to avoid that wood look up and decide okay where did this branch fall from and make a good decision you can also as you crack the branches apart feel if they have any kind of sap or stickiness to them that sap then burns off with an unflavorable result on our food and it just doesn't give us a good flavor so whenever you can try to use a nice hard wood maple or hickory something like that to cook your food with it's just gonna enhance your experience that much more but like i said this initial fire just get it started however you need to get it started and and one more quick thing before we get into actual making the fire because this sort of goes hand in hand there's really only four concepts when it comes to cooking and that's boiling frying grilling and baking we're going to cover all them with our campfire [Music] now the first style of cooking that we are going to look at which should not ever be overlooked is boiling now when i say boiling a lot of people just think about boiling water to disinfect it and yes that is definitely accurate but when it comes to cooking there are a lot of different things we can use boiling in order to do first think about things like stews making a beef stew with vegetables in it boiling and simmering works great for that we can also carry very easy trail rations such as pasta or even our famous ramen noodles now the nice thing with boiling is you just need some type of pot or cup that you can hang over the fire and then your meal is just all done totally complete inside one vessel makes it so easy for us now the reason that i like to talk about boiling as the first cooking option is that it requires little to no fire regulation as long as your pot or your cup has some type of bail or hanging device you can hang that very simply with a tripod or a stick over your campfire remember our ultimate goal here is to get that hot enough that the water or the juices inside begin to boil and then we just basically have to let the fire simmer down or we can lift the pot up a little bit higher in order to regulate the heat for that so it's a very very simple concept never to be overlooked next up is frying and frying food over campfire can really take your experience to a whole new level i mean think about all the good things from french fries to potato chips to chicken to i don't know buffalo wings all that good stuff right you can make all that over a campfire very easily now i like to put this right after boiling because as we mentioned with boiling it doesn't matter how your flame is i mean there's not much regulation that's going on there so once you build your first fire and you have that flame going crazy as it starts to die down when it's close to getting to the point of just embers that's when we want to place our oil on the fire now one thing that you don't want to do is put your oil in a pan or in a pot and place it right down in the fire because there's a good chance it's going to heat up so quick that it's going to catch on fire or burn so as the flames start to get low and when they start to get about from amber to top of her thumb like thumbs up yeah it's time to cook that's a great time to get your oil on the fire i'm going to show you one method that's very easy to do this to keep your oil up off the fire so right now my flames are a good thumbs up height i'm going to take my grill grate from my flat pack and i'm going to just lay it across those rocks that i put in place in order to hold the grate now what i can do really easily is i can take my oil i can add it to my pot or to my pan and start to get that hot what you're probably noticing is that there are flames at this point we're not cooking on just embers but as this continues to die down those flames are going to go away we're going to have a hotbed of embers under the oil we can then very simply add small sticks the size of a pencil to this to increase that flame and keep those coals nice and hot so once these flames die down to just embers that oil will be just about ready to fry in so with a hot bed of coals underneath this oil is ready to go and then third on the menu everybody's favorite grilling now this is somewhat of a continuation of our set up for our frying dish okay what we're looking at here is i have our grate still in position from frying but underneath i have just a hot bed of embers and that is what is so super important so with a setup like this even though it doesn't look like it's hot you hear that beautiful sizzling cooking very very well but what a lot of people are going to ask is well what about that heat is it going to dissipate over time and yes it will dissipate over time so it's important we continue to feed this fire and what we're looking for is just small sticks so it does require some maintenance but grilling should be a faster process we shouldn't have our meat on the grill for 15 20 30 minutes unless we have some big thick juicy piece of meat or maybe we're doing something else that's going to take some time majority of the time it's going to be a very quick type cook so if your embers are starting to die down very small sticks just easily fed underneath are going to be just enough to get a little bit of flame but not too much flame that we burn our food but continue that bed of embers to keep growing now a very simple concept to go along with grilling if you don't want to carry a grate in the field and you have something that you want to grill such as this piece of meat is to simply just take a stick split it down the middle and then skewer your meat on here now why i like to split the stick like this is because if the meat is on there like this as i rotate this in order to cook it it's not going to just spin on a stick freely it is pinched inside there and in our cooking procedure would be very much the same we want to place it over embers again cooking over open flame that flame is unpredictable the temperatures are going to vary depending where you put that but the coals are going to give you a nice consistent heat so again i highly recommend have an area of the fire that you have your flame and a secondary part of the fire that you have just hot coals that you're feeding with small sticks even at that point when cooking with your stick and your meat it's going to make life just that much better and your meal is going to come out that much better and then the final way of cooking that is overlooked so many times at camp and out on the trail is baking baking can be done with a campfire you just need some certain tools [Music] so as many of you already know yuko makes this really cool grill called a flat pack that you can put in your backpack there's different sizes to it and stuff and it opens up and if you don't have anywhere that you can make a fire pit you can cook with this with wood or charcoal but this thing also can get transformed over to an oven yes that's right we can transfer this thing over to an oven now it takes a little bit of work i would definitely suggest trying this out at home first so you understand the setup but i'm going to show you that right now so with the flat pack comes the grill the grate and then the great handle okay so for this what we're going to do is we're going to use every single piece first thing we're going to do is we're going to open up the grille and we're going to take the grate and we're going to work it right down the center now don't over press this that you break anything but it is a very snug fit to get it down inside here but it does fit you can hear how that's sort of just locked into place that also holds this open at this point and as of right now this front is very wobbly so what we're going to do now is we're going to come over to the side we're going to take the great handle we're going to go in the back side and work it through the grate just as we would if we were using it with the grate and then we're going to come further up spreading that open and we're gonna work that in the grate from right here what this does now is locks this in place so it will not move okay so we have that great handle separated and we have that in the front and then last but not least we're going to find an area near our campfire in which we can set this now the theory behind this is that the heat from the fire is going to flow into here and it's going to work itself through keeping this inner area hot so in my case i have a flat rock i'm going to set this on and push it close to my fire now if i would just let this go it might stand up but to be on the safe side what i did was i took a rock and i'm going to just set this behind that's going to hold this back leg open and it's going to keep that grill in place a few cooking tips with this you don't want the fire directly underneath this setup you want it out in the front so you want the radiant heat to work back into the grill you are going to need a second vessel just be careful that if you get too much heat underneath at some point of course you can burn this so it's very important that while you bake this you move it around and if at any chance you can flip the item that you're cooking such as a muffin mix or a cookie mix flip it part of the way through but you're still gonna have the opportunity to bake this so very simply i'm just gonna place this inside just like this and allow that heat to cook that now our baked goods are inside our oven what you need to remember is that baking in the outdoors is going to take time it's not a fast process so it requires patience and it requires just sitting back relaxing and watching your item bake so turn it spin it flip it if possible and sooner or later it will get done and there you have it the primary cooking strategies over a campfire see very simple you thought it was going to be so much more complex than that but the reality is that anything we do at home we can do when we are outdoors we just have to have the know-how how to do it so honestly i really hope you embark in the journey of outdoor cooking and you try these different techniques remember they might not happen the first time or two until you get the system down but if you utilize what i just taught you it's going to speed up that process so much more and your meals are going to be just that much better outside so this was dan wowack with how to cook over a campfire put this stuff to use and you will have a better trip next time you go out and you're going to press all your family and friends they're going to think you went to culinary school by the time you're done cooking for them it's gonna be great stay lit and stay in the woods

Channel: UCO

Views: 35,398

Rating: 4.9599075 out of 5

Keywords: camp cooking, campfire cooking, outdoor cooking, grilling, campfire, bushcraft, survival

Id: 9JD6_VqAcfA

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020