Camping Food: Outdoor Cooking

Camping food can be a pretty baggy term---you can put anything into it that you want.

On one hand, food for camping ideas can be taken literally, and refer to those dishes and cooking techniques you’d use while actually camping. Even that’s a pretty broad concept. If you’re car camping, everything, not excepting the sink, can be included. On the other hand, backpacking cookery is all about bulk and weight. Yet they’re both about camping food and cooking methods. Canoe or boat camp and you’re somewhere in between, in terms of the equipment and foodstuffs you actually can carry.

Camp cooking might refer to an actual hunting or fishing camp, and the food prepared there. Could be a canvas wall tent in the mountains of Montana, where the trout are so fresh caught they curl in the pan; or a palatial lodge in the Northeast, where the newly-harvested woodcock are prepared in the classic French manner by a professional chef; or a pop-up camper parked on the shore, and a clam bake in the sand for you and a dozen new-made friends.

Maybe you’re on a float trip, and pause on a convenient sandbar. While your buddy opens the baked beans and slices the spuds, you filet the walleye you’d caught upstream, dust it with seasoned flour, and fry it in an old black skillet. That’s just as much camping food as is an envelope of freeze-dried peaches used by the backpacker, or the multi-course meal cooked on a propane stove in a megabucks motorhome.

Whether you carry everything with you, or supplement with locally caught and gathered comestibles, influences your camping food ideas as well. Will there be a young deer taken just for meat while you pursue a big-racked buck? Will you take time out from the catch & release flyfishing for smallmouth bass to fill a bucket with bluegill for the table? Will the wild turkey wait while you fill your pockets with morels? If so, you’ll have one kind of menu. If not, you’ll have another altogether.

Far as I’m concerned, camp cooking doesn’t just mean where you cook. It includes what you cook. All the fish and game you harvested, all the mushrooms and fiddleheads you gathered, all the shellfish you pried from rocks and piles are part of the camp cookery scheme of things, even if, they are things you hunted and gathered to take home with you. Indeed, the very point of the camping trip may have been to harvest a deer, or fill a freezer with fish, or gather a bunch of fiddleheads in the spring.

Those walleye filets taste particularly good on a river sandbar cooked on an open fire. But, if they’re handled correctly, they taste just as good in your kitchen at home. Proper field care of your catch is essential if you want to translate camping food to fine food on the table, and the very concept of camp cookery includes ways of doing that.

I’m sure you’ve had this experience---almost everybody has. You have a great week up at the lodge. The outfitter graciously freezes the catch for you to take home. You load the packages in a cooler, cover with ice, and head out for the multi-day trip home, renewing the ice along the way.

By the time you get home all that fish has defrosted, and must be either used right away or, omigod!, discarded.

Savvy camp cooks, however, know about techniques like super-chilling, instead of freezing, and field care of small game, and the best ways of keeping wild mushrooms fresh and tasty. This, too, is part of camping food and camp cookery.

And then, of course, there are the camping recipes themselves. Some are as simple as the campfire classic s’mores, while others are as complex as truit au bleu prepared in an upscale restaurant.

Camp cooking, more than any other kind, also means that no recipe is sacrosanct. A recipe, any recipe, should be thought of merely as a guide. Follow it as tightly or as loosely as you wish. There are no cookery police waiting to arrest you if you leave out an ingredient, or substitute one for another, or change the quantities.

The prime thing to remember about fish, game, and camp cookery is this: It should be fun. If you’re stressing out, whether in camp or in your home kitchen, then it’s not the right recipe for you.