Camp Cooking: Your guide to eating burned food and liking it

Nothing comes with quite so much notoriety and predilection to impending doom as preparing a meal for others in the outdoors. Factor in a nervous cook, tiny stove with enough BTU’s to weld steel, imprecise measuring implements and several packages of freeze dried delectables, and you have a recipe for culinary adventure.  Too much water and you end up with… well, it’s hard to tell exactly what you end up with. Too little water and your efforts are rewarded with petrified sludge.

With the above in mind, and to help prevent the ruffling of a cook’s sensitive nature, allow me to share two very basic, though unwritten rules of etiquette when eating camp cooking.

First, never repeat anything even close to the following: “This is amazing…really. I mean, after a 20 mile hike and after eating nothing but nuts, jerkey and smashed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches flavored with insect repellent for lunch, this, ummmn, dinner, really tastes good.” Translated, you have clearly told the cook that their food tastes only slightly better than dirt and you’re eating it as you have no other choices and you are starving.

Second, because most camp cooking gets completed at dusk, food consumption generally occurs under the cloak of darkness. This is a blessing in disguise since no one really wants to see what they’re eating anyway. Remember, it is considered cowardly and most unsportsmanlike to analyze your food with a headlamp or flashlight prior to eating.

Of course, no matter what kind of outdoor adventure one embarks on, there are two food staples that have come to define an outdoor camping experience, and require little, if any involvement from the cook — Somemores and Camp Coffee.

Despite the obvious advantage of serving a food group that requires campers to take responsibility for the preparation of their own desert, whoever thought up the idea of mixing graham crackers, toasted marshmallows, and melted Hershey’s chocolate needs counseling. It’s not that these ingredients are bad, or that the concept of eating the resulting mashed mess is almost as much fun as wearing it. The problem with this age-old desert lies in the toasting of the marshmallow.

I have witnessed mild-mannered and veteran campers, who will argue about nothing else, come to blows over the correct method for toasting marshmallows. Golden brown or charcoal crisp? Delicately roasted 10-inches from the glowing coals, or dipped recklessly into the flame and removed a burning mass of goo? Cooked on a green stick carefully cut and whittled, or on a packed-in wire skewer?

And it doesn’t stop there. Do you place the mallow on the graham cracker first or does the chocolate go first? Do you toast the cracker and then place the mallow flambeau between two chunks of chocolate and then the graham, or will one chocolate chunk suffice? I prefer the coward’s way out and ban anything resembling someores on any trip I’m on. After all, why risk the social implications of serving a classic desert the wrong way? And it gets worse I tell you. I just learned that apparently, how you prepare your sticky feast says something about you…what I am not sure, but you can read the commentary by Nikki Hodgson here: What Your Marshmallow Roasting Technique Says About You.

Thankfully, coffee preparation is much easier, and anyone who can boil water can step up to the coffee-preparation bar. First, realize that if you can drink it without grimacing, it ISN’T camp coffee. I’ve seen camp coffee so strong that the spoon to stir it with corroded a bit more with every swirl. Forget about carbo-loading to get you through your adventure. Experienced outdoorsmen and women know that only caffeine loading from properly prepared camp coffee will get them through consecutive 20-mile days.

Making this nectar is easy. Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil. Remove the pot from the fire or stove. In theory, you add one teaspoon of coffee for every cup of water, but who’s counting ? Grab a handful and toss it in. Doesn’t look like enough? Grab another handful or two and toss the pile of grounds into the thickening slurry. Cover and let the mess steep for five minutes or so, keeping the pot warm. To settle the grounds, add a drop or two of cold water and tap the side of the pot with a spoon using a happy little rhythm — unhappy rhythms only serve to rile the beans. Now decant the coffee.

Take the first sip. Once your eyes realign, remember etiquette rule number three — don’t smile at anyone until you’ve tongue-cleaned the grounds from your teeth. Of course, the gritty nature of camp coffee is due to the few unsettled grounds that help to add to its special flavor and texture, which is what makes drinking the morning elixir so memorable.

–Michael Hodgson