If you love good food and resist camping because you don’t want to be stuck with freeze dried food and grilled hotdogs as your meal choices, then you are probably a foodie. Which means that your dining needs are going to be much different than your average camper.
There is nothing wrong with having refined tastes and the good news is that you don’t need to sacrifice. You can cook and enjoy some fine dining even at the campsite. With some patience, the right care and some planning, you can cook up a gourmet meal to make the other campers salivate.
In this article, I will go over how to go about this, from the essential foods to pack to the preparation.
1 - Have the right tools
The key to being able to cook a gourmet meal is how few barriers there are going to be. What I mean by that is if it is going to be too difficult to replicate what you would do in a normal kitchen, you aren’t likely to try over a campfire.
If you have the right tools, then there won’t be too many hurdles and the experience will be enjoyable.
Have a good, sharp butterfly knife that won’t take up as much space as a chef knife but is sharp enough to do your prep.
Next up will be a god cast iron pan. It will be heavy to pack, but you can do a lot in a cast iron which makes it perfect for cooking over a fire. Next is a grill grate or even a small portable grill that you can allow you to cook over a flame.
A dutch oven is essential if you want to do any baking or if you plan on a long, slow cooked stew.
2 - Plan your meal well
Have a menu that you want to create and then go about the logistics of how to cook it before you settle on it. For instance, you may not want to have to cook down a sauce that takes hours as you want to be able to be out enjoying nature.
Try to come up with dishes that use premium ingredients but don’t require much in the way of a complicated technique. An example would be steak and lobster tails for a surf and turf. You could sear the steak in a cast iron pan and then add some mushrooms to the pan and deglaze with some white wine. You’ve got a pan sauce for the steak while the lobster tails are grilling and it only took a few minutes.
Fast cooking ingredients are going to work best. Alternatively, you could do some of the prep before you leave so you have everything ready to cook which takes a lot of the aggravation out of preparing a complex meal in spartan surroundings.
3 - Have something sweet
Nothing says fine dining like the addition of a dessert course. Of course, s’mores are the campfire standard and you should allow an appearance. But, there are lots of other delicious desserts you can make with a campfire.
For instance, roasted banana rice pudding is as easy as it gets. Make your classic rice pudding in your cast iron pan. When it is cooling, take a few bananas and place them in the hot embers but not over the open flame. Let them roast in the skin for about ten minutes and then serve over the pudding.Enter your text here...