Cooking Systems in the Backwoods - The American Frontier

surviving in the woods that's what Dan will whack of coal cracker bushcraft specializes in and in this episode he's gonna come along and help us out with cooking a little bit of rabbit thanks for joining us hey we're here today with Dan wool whack of coal cracker bushcrafter we're gonna be talking about woodland cooking systems explain yes so we're gonna make a variety of different cooking systems when you're around camp and you have just that campfire going rather than sticking a piece of meat on a stick and struggling with it or I do that yeah so rather than doing that you can make different cook systems with what's around us here in the environment to really make cooking more pleasurable make your food better not only make rotisserie --zk make tripods so we can make better stews and really control what we're doing because we need to think about the long hunters out there they had very limited meat at certain times so they didn't have an option of burning the meat or absolutely dropping it and losing it into fire so they had to be a little bit more particular so if you make a nice cook system you can not only feed yourself better but you have multiple men you could set up cook systems so everybody can do what they need to do around that campfire so what do we need for getting this done a variety of different branches out here so we're gonna go pick some and then we'll get started with the systems [Music] so what kind of species and type of wood were we looking for here so it depends on the cook system species doesn't matter too much as long as it's green wood we don't want any type of dead wood for the simple fact that's gonna be exposed to heat at some point so we don't want that actually catching on fire so green woods gonna be best for the tripod which I really feel is the quintessential camp tool because not only can we cook with it but we can use it for a smoke system to smoke meat but we can also use it for shelters smoking hides it's very important so with something like this we want long straight sticks about an inch in diameter okay is good enough that's gonna be good and strong if it's green wood and about five to six foot in length is Merle's to optimal you can make them shorter but this longer length just seems to be a little more options yes exactly so the process can be very simple or very complex we're gonna take the middle of the road we're gonna put a proper lashing on this okay so if cordage was at a very minimum out in the field you can just use one or two wraps and make it sort of work but we'll put a good lashing on here and then the way we're gonna lash this we can always remove that cording with that cordage when we're done so it's very simple we can reuse it yes so first thing we want to do is get the bottom of our sticks lined up and again I cut all of these very close to the same length okay so now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna get the sticks where they lay very flat evenly yep and I'll take a piece of cordage that I have now how you start this can vary there's no really proper way so I'm just gonna put a loop on here that has a slipknot okay and start to tighten this down now any time we want wrap around the sticks this way it is a lashing and the wrappings inside are the frapping 's okay so first we're gonna put a lashing so we're gonna begin to just wrap this around these sticks and just take your time with this and get it to lay in there properly so we look into bind these up really tight well you can it depends on what project if this was a shelter I would really want to bind these up good and tight so it doesn't move one option you could do to buying these up tight is take just an extra piece of stick that I gathered while I'm out there and use it as a toggle just to tighten that up now you see how that bunched up we don't want that to happen so we're gonna just open that back up a little bit and use our knee right here to keep that in line and I'm just going to tighten that down so for every three lashings one frapping is a good idea so it doesn't have to be exact but as long as we're close with that I think it's gonna hold up just fine for us so I'm done my lashings there I will grab my coggle again just to put a little bit of tension on that now I'm gonna begin my frapping so I'm gonna go in between right each of this and around and this is really what's going to bind up and make this work more properly now you might have to play around with this a little bit to get it to work we yeah yep and I'm just gonna continue I'll put two wrappings okay right in between each one of them in between each one of those [Music] and really that'll be it then at this point so we made our lat our lashings and our frapping x' now to finish this off you could do several different things we're just going to put a half hitch in here just a hole just something simple to hold it in place and we will be set to go so should we give this a try now over the privacy all right so bait very simple just open it up and you can feel it's a little bit tight now but that will adjust over time as we loosen up on that when this is our left over yes so we always want to make sure that we have leftover cordage because it's very simple then we take that toggle I was using to tighten down that lashing and with just a very simple slip knot should I place that simple toggle on if you'd like yeah and then we just use that bail to hold our pot in place look at that now the beauty of this system is number one we can make very fine adjustments by just sliding our tripod in see we got some height or if you want to grab that leg and open that up we can even get lower and then if we need other type of adjustment we can also always wrap this over the top sure and we can really get that high off of the fire and that way if we need to simmer something it works really well so you can see how well yeah this works with something down it's so simple and it's so versatile yep yep so what do we got here so we're gonna make a pot suspension system and the beauty of this system is that you can put multiple pots on the campfire you can make it as big as you would need so if you have a real big long fire and multiple men at camp everybody can use the fire equally so what we're gonna need to do is we need to uprights that are why branches okay now these can vary in length I like to say around 3 foot in length is best with the Y on top and then on the outside of your fire pit you're gonna just push them straight down inside so if you want to give a little push down to that one get them as level as we can and then what we're gonna do is just take a straight branch that's long enough to go across both of them ok just like that and you can level the system out as much as you would need to but it looks pretty good right now so you might be thinking what actually are we gonna do with this I mean we just have a bar hang in there well we make hanging Syst hangers so there's different types of hangers we can make this hanger right here is just a whi branch so it was growing up this way we trimmed it here and I put a notch up top right but we're actually gonna flip that to use it so when we hang our pot we use that notch and we can hang it this way over the fire you can put multiple notches up on here and that will allow the pot different heights depending what you need sure then we can also take two Y branches if we have some extra twine or cordage with us and tie them off so I have one Y branch that was growing this way and another one that was growing this way lash them together hang that on here right then you could hang your pot on there right also so as you can see we're a little close to the fire there so making multiple hangers is gonna be most beneficial and again you could take this up as high as you want or as low as you want depending on what you're actually doing and we could hang other things on this other than the pots we could probably you could even hang a piece of meat on that if you need yep or if you took sliced me and you skewered it through you can hang it almost like a kabob and then just cut it as it cooks right so what do we got here well this is very similar the setup to the last pot suspension system so we still have the Y upright branches but you can see that I lowered them a lot okay and the reason I lower them is we're actually I'm gonna make a rotisserie so if we have any type of meat source we can actually rotisserie it over the fire now to do that rather than just that single straight stick I took another Y branch and then I lashed a smaller branch onto that and the reason for that is if we put just a piece of meat on a round branch it's gonna spin and we can't get that rotisserie effect so this is gonna work as a clamp once we skewer our meat and tie it down then the meats not going to go anywhere we can lay this across the Y branch just like this and the reason this is a Y is because we can then use that to incrementally rotate yes yep so we're gonna do that and we can just turn it around that way now this morning I actually harvested a rabbit so we can put the rabbit right on a skewer and take a look at what it looks like okay so I now have this lash done you can see as I rotate this it's not sliding on the spit itself right so we can set it right in place here like this and then as we need to rotate that we would just do so so it works really well this way to just constantly keep rotating that and get a good nice even roast all around it well we've got meat we got the the cooking system I suppose we should get a fire going and cook this wrap it up this reminds me so much of what's going on in Nicholas Cresswell's Journal they're traveling into the backcountry they do have very many provisions and many of the provisions they have with them get spoiled along the way they are eating off the land as they travel you know whatever game they can get ahold of that's what they're cooking they're eating in the most simplistic way possible so the rabbit has been cooking now for about 25 to 30 minutes and in the spirit along her we're just gonna eat right off the stick here so we'll cut ourselves a little section I'm gonna cut some of his back strap off for us right through here get you some meat right off that it looks done yeah yeah I'll give it a little taste here smoked rabbit yep rotisserie style yeah really good and if you were hungry and didn't eat for a couple days it'd be really good yeah and no gay meanness at all on this now it's wonderful basically chicken flavor really yeah I really want to thank Dan from coal cracker bushcraft for coming and showing us these different wet methods of building these cooking setups around the fire whether it's a tripod or a simple rotisserie setup like this it just you know it's really great that we can build so many different kind of systems with whatever's just around us we only need a knife maybe an axe a little bit of you know cord or twine that we could make ourselves if we needed to and you you can cook whatever you need here right by the fire so a great system thank you Dan for bringing us this these great techniques these great skills if you're interested in learning more about connecting with the outdoors about how to survive in a wilderness situation or just have fun in your backyard with a lot of you know bluing right off the land make sure to check out Dan's YouTube channel I'll put a link down in the description below and your what's the school again CO Appalachian Bushman school were located in Pennsylvania right and hard Appalachian Mountains so you can go and take classes directly from Dan such such a great set of skills to learn so thank you Dan so much and thank you guys for watching [Music] you

Channel: Townsends

Views: 1,031,994

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, james townsend and son, jas. townsend and son, backwoods smoker, american frontier, 18 century cooking, revolutionary war, historical cooking, earth oven, colonial cooking, townsend and son

Id: McpCJkPluFM

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 09 2018