More Than S'mores

Advice for cooking over a campfire

Welcome back to Between A Mossy Rock And A Hard Place, the fortnightly advice column for all your outdoorsy conundrums!

This week’s question was submitted by Aspiring Camp Chef (and you can submit your own through an easy form!):

Suggestions for easy recipes to cook over a campfire besides s’mores? I want to be more adventurous with my camp menus this summer.

Uh oh, I’m going to have to come clean about my worst campfire cooking disaster! This week’s advice might be better categorized as a cautionary tale, however, I don’t yet have enough questions coming in to be choosy about the ones I answer.¹

I’m pretty good at melting a marshmallow over a fire and I can assemble a halfway decent charcuterie board in a rustic campground², but my outdoor culinary pursuits generally stop there. Though I have fond memories of childhood camping trips where my dad cooked up bacon and eggs on a Coleman stove, as an adult I rarely bring ingredients that require refrigeration. I’m a perfectly capable cook, but I’d rather read next to a campfire than add to my list of camp chores with convoluted meals.

Perfectly melted marshmallow, May 2021

A few years ago, I tried to find a middle ground and fell down a rabbit hole of learning about foil packet meals—basically, a bunch of ingredients wrapped up in foil and then placed in the campfire to slowly cook. It seemed like the camping equivalent of sticking a casserole in the oven, with little effort needed for either the cooking or the clean up. However, most of the recipes included chicken and I didn’t love the idea of raw meat sitting in my cooler for a weekend. So I decided to try something even easier, something that the online recipe claimed would be foolproof.

And that was when disaster struck.