Campfire Cooking 101
Honestly, I came to cooking over a campfire skeptically. As a cook who despises recipes that you need to “feel your way through” or lean heavily on phrases like “to taste”, the process required some personal growth.
Turns out campfire cooking is a lot of fun to learn and refine, whether traveling full-time or just looking to enhance your experience of cooking outdoors. After some trial and error, the results have been worth the effort. Here are some hard-fought tips and tricks.
Where to build your fire pit
Try to build on the site of an existing fire ring. Make sure the pit is out in the open and there is no risk of grass, shrubs or hanging branches catching. Do not build a fire when there are high winds.
How to build your firepit
If possible, start with a stone base (not dirt) for the sake of safety and ground preservation. Build a u-shaped fire pit, narrow enough for your grill grate to span, with the opening facing away from the wind.
This allows you to feed wood under the grate as needed. Build up the walls so that the grate can rest about 10in above the base of the fire. Finally, use a large stone to act as a kind of door for the pit opening.
How to build your fire
Start with birch bark, newspaper or similar starter fuel and avoid lighter fluid because in makes food taste bad.
Set two good-sized logs (~12-16in long and 3in thick) about 8 inches apart. Throw a handful or two of birch bark or crumpled newspaper between the logs, then a handful of twigs or dry wood shavings. Place 8-12 sticks (~1/2in in thick) diagonally or in a log-cabin pattern, resting on top of the logs.
Light the bark or newspaper with a match. If the larger sticks do not catch fire, feed with more twigs/wood shavings. Once your larger sticks are burning, add more logs.
The size of your coal bed will depend on what you’re cooking but start out with a larger fire than you think you’ll need. For the most part, you want to cook over coals, not flames, and you want that bed of coals to last. For example, if you’re baking anything then you may be feeding this fire for as much as an hour before you’ve built up a large enough bed of coals. More is always better.
How to control heat
Hold your hand 4-5 inches above the embers of your cooking fire until it becomes too hot to handle. 2-3 seconds is “Hot”; 5-7 seconds is “Medium”. Now that’s precision.
Piling more embers directly beneath your cooking area will naturally turn the heat up. Dispersing embers or increasing the distance between them and your cooking area will turn the heat down.
Piling ashes on top of your embers is another effective way to reduce heat without compromising or extinguishing your fire. Temperature is tricky to regulate, so try to gauge and control heat as you go and watch your timing closely.
For that nice browning on top, you’ll need to place coals on top of your pan lid and resist the urge to peek.
There’s no getting around some amount of trial and error when learning how to cook over a campfire, but the challenge is part of the fun and everyone expects a little char now and then.
Watch it all come together with this campfire deep dish pizza:
How to cook over a campfire is a work in progress, so please add your thoughts and questions in the comments!