7 Ways Of Cooking Your Food In Nature

Do you love camping trips, but at the same time you do not want to eat canned and dry food for a couple of days straight?

How many times you wanted to cook a fresh and juicy meal, but you don’t have a stove, pan or electricity in the middle of the woods? So why don’t you just find out how our ancestors used to cook before electricity, just using fire and the goods resources provided by nature.

Knowing how to set up your fire area for cooking can transform your outdoor experience.

 

1. Cook in a fire pit

Photo Credit: Tina Saey

One of the easiest ways to cook outdoors is by clearing an area of ground so that you can set up a fire on top of it and then suspend pots or food over the fire, if you need to protect the fire from the wind or you need help to enclose the fire so it does not spread you can use dry stones around the edge, this can also be useful for putting pots and pans on so they stay clean.

Coals can be used for cooking and this setup is good for groups cooking at the same time.

2. Spit-roasting on a stick

Spitted fowl are rotated by a hand crank and basted with a long-handled spoon in this illustration from the Romance of Alexander, Bruges, 1338-44

If you want to eat a freshly cooked chicken or fish, but don’t have a spit-roasting cooker, the easiest way to cook it would be just by using a stick and set up a fire.  Food has been cooked this way for thousands of years.

Get a thick stick, one that would support the weight of the meal, assemble your food on it, and keep rotating it above the heat until it’s cooked. You will probably have to secure the food on the stick with wire or natural twine, or it will twist on the stick. Alternatively, you can skewer it through at a right angle with smaller sticks.

Make sure that the flames do not scorch the food, cooking this way over hot coals is best.

3. Cook on a plank

Photo Credit: Edsel Little

This is a very easy and somewhat exotic way of cooking a meal. Just set up a fire, and wait until it burns out so that you have hot coals in your pit.

Find a piece of wood with a flat face, clean it, and put your piece of fish or meat on it, you can fix the food with small wooden wedges and then position the food on the plank so that it is facing the heat, just reposition as needed so that the food cooks evenly.

4. Wrapped cooking

Photo Credit

Find yourself few big leafs (nonpoisonous), clean them up, and wrap your meal in them, place the wrapped food in a pit with hot coal and cover it with more hot coal. In just a few easy steps you could have a hot, delicious meal.  This is good for foods that do not need to cook for a long time, such as fish.

5. Cook on a stone

Photo Credit: tuchodi

This is easy but it can be a messy way of cooking. Place a big flat rock above a fire and support it with other stones, creating a table-like shape. Wait until the stone heats and then put your meal directly on top of it. The thinner the stone is, the better. Meat is good cooked this way

6. Oven in nature

If you want your meal to be evenly cooked, you could set up a handmade natural oven. Just dig a hole in a shape of a rectangle, and place stones on the bottom of it and its side walls. Set a fire in the hole and wait until it burns out so that the stones get really hot so that you can place your meal inside and cook it.  If you can fashion a lid or cover the pit in some way you can contain the heat.

7. Cook on a stick

Photo Credit Nina Hale

Of course one of the easiest ways to cook a quick meal in nature is by using a stick and fire. Just set up a fire, place your food on a small stick and cook it until it’s done, simple. Although you do need to use smaller pieces of food to cook this way. It’s also a great way of cooking damper bread.

So now you have some good ideas for the next time you head out for few days in the wilderness, but don’t forget to bring some extra food, just in case.

 

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