You haven’t lived until you’ve had a mostly-black roasted marshmallow or a scorched-on-the-outside but cold-on-the-inside hotdog. And if you have had either of these things, it’s likely you were camping and cooked it over a campfire.
One of the challenges of camping, especially with a family, is campfire cooking. It’s just different than cooking at home where you have thermostatically controlled cooking surfaces. But there are some camp cooking tips that can make it better.
This post isn’t about specific recipes, it’s about making the cooking experience easier. These camp cooking tips will help!
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4 Camp Cooking Tips and Tricks
1. Build a “camping food” menu.
The first camp cooking tip is to build a “camping food” menu for your family. Take some time to write down meal ideas for your next camping trip. In fact, create a notebook or binder with your menu and recipes. Add to your menu when you try something new and you like it, and remove items that don’t turn out well or you just don’t like for whatever reason.
Start your menu with food you already cook on your grill.
Hot dogs, brats, and hamburgers are summer classics everyone already knows how to cook on a fire. But you probably grill other items, like steak, chicken, tin foil meals, and vegetables. Be sure to include your favorite “grill” meals in your “camping food” menu. These can be your “go to” items to start your menu.
Experiment with new recipes at home first.
If you can cook it at home, you can cook it while camping. It might take a couple tries to get it just right, but that’s perfectly normal. If you are not a very good cook, don’t try an elaborate camping recipe you found on Pinterest unless you’ve at least tried to cook it at home first. Try making it on your stove or in your oven first. If that goes well, try making it on your grill or on your fire pit. It’s much easier to experiment at home first.
2. Don’t rely solely on the campfire.
While grilling and cooking over a campfire are very similar, cooking over a wood campfire can be challenging. Getting the grilling area to a proper cooking temperature without engulfing the food in flames can be a challenge. With practice, it can be mastered. But there are other options.
Use charcoal instead of wood.
If you grill with charcoal at home, then using charcoal while you are camping is a natural transition. Charcoal burns more consistently than wood and produces much less flame making it easier to cook with than wood. Most campsites have a fire pit or grill that can be fueled with wood or charcoal. Just make sure your charcoal fire has good ventilation.
Bring a portable grill.
A portable propane or charcoal grill is an excellent option for camp cooking. A campfire is great for sitting around and shooting the breeze or for cooking easy things like hotdogs and marshmallows, but a portable grill can make the rest of your cooking much easier than cooking everything on the campfire.
Invest in a camp stove.
A camp stove makes camp cooking much more like cooking at home and they aren’t expensive. Bring a few pots and pans, a canister of propane, and you are ready to cook. Sometimes the wind can make cooking on a camp stove a challenge, but when that happens, you can simply move the stove somewhere out of the wind.
3. Pre-cook what you can.
One tip we have used on many occasions is to pre-cook as much of our food as possible (or buy pre-cooked foods).
I’ll use brats as an example. Cooking raw brats over a fire is a challenge. They tend to get burned on the outside but not cooked all the way through. We have learned to boil our brats at home or buy pre-cooked brats from the store. This way, all you need to do is warm them up over the fire and get some good char marks on them. You don’t have to worry about undercooking them.
We have done the same with pasta. Cook your pasta at home and throw it in a Ziplock bag. Once you are at the campsite, you can heat up your sauce on the fire or camp stove, stirring in the pasta once the sauce is hot.
Look through your camping menu and figure out if there are items you can easily pre-cook.
4. Avoid cooking.
If you can cook it at home, you can cook it while camping…but you may not want to. If cooking is not an enjoyable task for you or you don’t want to take the time to cook, simply avoid cooking. Camping should be relaxing, so if cooking stresses you out, find alternatives.
We usually only plan on cooking one meal per day while we are camping in order to make it simple and less time-consuming. We often pack pop tarts, cereal bars, or other grab-and-go types of foods for breakfast. Lunches are usually sandwiches, chips, and cookies.
Be sure to add some “no cook” meals to your camp menu.
What about you? What camp cooking tips do you have?
