Camping News & Reviews
We’ve tested many fire pits, and in terms of versatility and portability, the Fireside Outdoor Pop Up Pit is among the best. At only 7.8 lbs, it easily handles both grilling and bonfires and packs down to a small size in 60 seconds.
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Perfecting the technique of using a Dutch oven over an open fire gets you cooking outdoors, keeps your fire-building skills sharp, and, well, just feels like a good skill to have in the event of the End Times.
Dutch ovens work effectively because they retain heat and cook evenly in the imperfect environment of an open fire, says Emily Rahravan, an editorial assistant at America’s Test Kitchen, where she’s also known as the camp cook extraordinaire. For four years she did much of the cooking for her outdoors club at Allegheny College, including many big-batch meals in Dutch ovens.
A cast-iron Dutch oven will also unequivocally survive the apocalypse. “I love Dutch ovens because they’re basically bulletproof,” says Matt Carter, chef and partner at Fat Ox, The Mission, and Zinc Bistro restaurants in Arizona. When Carter takes river trips, he packs two cast-iron Dutch ovens. They’re no worse for wear after getting a little banged around, he says, and when he’s done cooking, he simply scrubs them out with a little river sand.
Here’s how to put yours to work.
Sticking that gorgeous, $ 400 enamel-lined number you got for your wedding into a fire isn’t the best idea if you want to stay married. When Carter describes Dutch ovens as bulletproof, he’s talking about the cast-iron versions. Both he and Rahravan own models by Lodge, which are relatively affordable (they start at $ 49) and almost impossible to break. You can also often find them at secondhand stores and yard sales.
If you do buy a used one, make sure it comes with the right sized lid—it’s important that it fits tight. The other features are optional. Rahravan has one with three stubby legs, which makes it easier to stuff hot coals under. But you can achieve the same effect by propping a pot up on a few rocks. Pot hangers, which dangle over a fire and make your Dutch oven look like a cauldron, are unnecessary, both Rahravan and Carter say. You will, however, want good heat-proof gloves or oven mitts (preferably constructed with silicone) and a safe tool for moving hot coals around, like a small shovel.
There are few things that don’t work in a Dutch oven, but hearty recipes—think chili, stew, and pork shoulder—which can stand up to long, slow cook times, are a great place to start, says Carter. He almost always tucks a whole pork shoulder into the coals of a campfire before going to bed the first night of a camping trip. If you have enough hot coals, he says, it should be warm enough to keep that pork slow-cooking all night. The next day he feasts on tacos and pozole.
Of course, you don’t have to be a carnivore to dive into Dutch oven cooking. Rahravan would often make mushroom risotto on camping trips in college. (The trick is to stir regularly to keep the rice from scorching.) Soups are an easy, no-meat option too.
The only thing Carter says he avoids making in a Dutch oven are eggs and delicate cakes. Both are likely to burn on the bottom before being completely cooked on the top. Any other recipe that was written for a Dutch oven at home, however, should work outdoors, says Rahravan.
Cooking over a fire is a misnomer, since it’s not the flame so much as the coals you want. Rahravan says building a fire is usually her first step when she gets to a campsite. She’ll set up her tent while she waits for the fire to generate the glowing coals she’ll use for cooking. You know coals are hot enough when they glow red in the middle. “They should be kind of shimmery,” she explains. Or, if it’s daylight and it’s hard to see them glowing, Carter says they should have a greyish coating of ash on the outside.
If you want to sit around your fire and cook on it, you’ll need a two-sided fire. Keep feeding half the fire, while letting the other half burn down to hot coals. Besides keeping you warm, a two-sided fire generates extra coals that will keep your Dutch oven toasty all night long.
If you need to sear or sautee, place your Dutch oven on a squat little pile of coals and let it heat up. This direct heat is too hot for low-and-slow braising, but it works well for browning meat or turning onions translucent. Once you’re done with this step, though, you’ll want to chill things out a bit. To lower the temp, either place a wire rack over your pile of coals and elevate your Dutch oven, or place it on a few rocks.
For dishes that will cook for a long time, like stew, avoid messing with the food once you put the lid on the pot. Each time you do, you’ll be releasing valuable heat, says Rahravan. For the most evenly cooked product, top the lid with more hot coals, so that just like an oven, heat is coming from all sides. Carter will sometimes seal the sides of the Dutch oven before placing it on the fire, wrapping foil around the lid and the lip just to be extra sure no ash gets in. Rahravan says it’s probably OK to skip this step. “I find the kind of person who is going to making shakshuka or a pork roast fireside is not that worried about a little extra carbon in their food,” she laughs.
When adapting an indoors Dutch oven cooking recipe for outdoors, you’ll need to adjust expectations for how long it takes. Rahravan says things generally take longer over the fire—up to 20 percent more time, she estimates.
When you get to about the time the dish would take to cook indoors, crack open the lid and take a peek. “Cooking over a fire definitely makes you a better chef because you start to learn the visual cues for when things are done,” she says. As a general rule, meat should be brown, stews should be bubbly, and veggies should be soft. If things seem are moving especially slowly, grab more coals (this is why you build a two-sided fire), and slide them underneath your pot.
By the time you’re done, you’ll have that woody smoke smell in your hair and a bowl full of hot, nourishing food. Bonus: you’ll know that even if society breaks down completely, you can, at the very least, cook a damn good meal.
A fresh corn chowder is one of Rahravan’s go-to dishes for campfire Dutch oven cooking. She adapted the following recipe slightly for outdoor cooking from Cook It In Your Dutch Oven, an America’s Test Kitchen cookbook. For this dish, place your Dutch oven over a fire on a metal grate or rack, which will be hotter for sauteeing. If you don’t have a grate, let the fire burn down, and then bury the oven well into the coals so there’s plenty of heat.
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Outdoor News editor Tim Spielman joins Rapid Fire host Rob Drieslein for Episode 5. Rob and Tim cover topics including the wolf management plan and Minnesota wolf hunting season, the DNR Fisheries roundtable, the governor’s proposed bonding bill, DNR Sarah Strommen’s decision and explanation to not appeal the Lac qui Parle county board decision to Land Exchange Board and so much more. You won’t want to miss this ramble between the two editors.
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In November, 2018, the Camp and Woolsey Fires burned over 250,000 acres in California, killing 88 people, destroying over 20,000 buildings, and together costing $ 22.5 billion. It was the deadliest, most destructive month for wild fires in California ever, and the Camp Fire alone was the costliest natural disaster anywhere in the world in 2018. Emails obtained by The Guardian last month show the Trump administration asked its scientists to manipulate data about emissions produced by the fires to support its promotion of the logging industry.
“Can you have Brad and Todd gin up an estimate on the total [CO2] equivalent releases are so far for the current 2 [fires],” wrote James Reilly, director of the United States Geological Survey in an email to agency scientists on November 16, 2018. “That would make a decent sound bite the [Secretary of the Interior] could use to put some perspective on it.” Reilly is a Trump appointee with a record of suppressing climate change science.
At the time, that Secretary was Ryan Zinke, who hadn’t yet resigned from the position over corruption allegations. On November 30, the Department of the Interior issued a press release claiming that the 2018 wildfire season in California had emitted roughly 68 million tons of carbon dioxide. “This number equates to about 15 percent of all California emissions, and it is on par with the annual emissions produced by generating enough electricity to power the entire state for a year,” stated the press release.
Then-Secretary Zinke was quoted in that release: “We know that wildfires can be deadly and cost billions of dollars, but this analysis from the U.S. Geological Survey also shows just how bad catastrophic fires are for the environment and for the public’s health. There’s too much dead and dying timber in the forest, which fuels these catastrophic fires. Proper management of our forests, to include small prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and other techniques, will improve forest health and reduce the risk of wildfires, while also helping curb the carbon emissions. The intensity and range of these fires indicate we can no longer ignore proper forest management. We can and must do a better job of protecting both the forests and the communities on the urban-wildland interface. Leaving forests unmanaged is no longer a safe option.”
Four months prior to the release, Zinke wrote an op-ed in USA Today arguing that “active forest management,” (Zinke’s very politically correct term for logging) was the only tool that could address the state’s wildfire problem, and claiming that “radical environmentalists” were putting lives and homes at risk by working to limit or prevent that logging. I fact checked that op-ed, demonstrating that logging cannot be shown to reduce instances or severity of wildfires, and that the “radical environmentalists” cited in Zinke’s piece were actually working in partnership with the logging industry to try and create more fire-resilient forests and more profitable logging practices.
Of course, Zinke’s claims about the efficacy of logging weren’t the only factual inaccuracy. Scientists have since questioned the validity of the carbon emissions the USGS ginned up in support of the former-Secretary’s messaging.
Chad Hanson, a forest ecologist and founder of the John Muir Project,” told The Guardian that the emissions numbers produced for Zinke by the USGS were an “overestimate,” and said they, “can’t be squared with empirical data.” The USGS numbers also under represent emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels by cherry picking data. While electricity consumed by California in 2017 did produce just over 60 million tons of CO2, that particular data point covers just one of many sources of greenhouse gas emissions emitted in the state, which total about 430 million tons a year. The emails show Reilly searching for such a comparison; he first asked his scientists to compare fire emissions to that of the state’s transportation.
All this is doubly problematic because these falsehoods soon left the realm of propaganda, and entered actual policy. Less than a month later, on December 21, President Trump issued an executive order calling for a massive increase in logging on federal lands. The purpose? “For decades, dense trees and undergrowth have amassed in these lands, fueling catastrophic wildfires,” the order read. “Active management of vegetation is needed to treat these dangerous conditions on Federal lands but is often delayed due to challenges associated with regulatory analysis and current consultation requirements.”
That order goes on to mandate that DOI and the Department of Agriculture (which manages the United States Forest Service) exploit existing categorical exclusions and create new ones, in a move intended to reduce the public’s role in decision making under the National Environmental Protection Act.
This order was the culmination of a months-long disinformation campaign led by then-Secretary Zinke and President Trump, intended to shift the blame for the fires away from climate change, and onto California’s liberal government, with which Trump continues to feud. At the same time that Reilly was ordering his scientists to manufacture emissions numbers for the fires, the President made his bizarre claims in 2018 about the effectiveness of “raking” forests to clear their dense underbrush. And it was in August of that year, while the Carr Fire raged, that Trump issued his bizarre tweet about California diverting water into the ocean that was needed for fire fighting.
That tweet appears to be connected to the work of David Bernhardt, who was Zinke’s deputy, and has since succeeded him as Interior Secretary. At the time, Bernhardt was threatening to sue California for objecting to actions he was taking in benefit of a former lobbying client—Westlands Water District, an agricultural water provider. One of Bernhardt’s first actions upon taking office was to divert water from northern California to the state’s central valley, an area controlled by WWD. This water has nothing to do with fire fighting or prevention efforts.
And there was one other policy action that almost took place as part of this effort to justify the expansion of logging as a fire management tool. The month after that executive order, on January 9, 2019, President Trump threatened to withhold Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief funds from victims of the fires in California, again under the guise of arguing that the state was not effectively managing its forests. That’s the very argument Zinke was trying to add to, using those ginned up numbers on carbon emissions.
Connect these dots, and we see an administration that is willing to falsify information on deadly natural disasters in order to speed its rollback of environmental regulations in benefit of industry. And, rather than take effective actions to address the cause of these fires, is actually worsening the chances of fires burning out of control in the future both by reducing the fire resiliency of forests, and speeding the effects of climate change. While that’s going on, the President is continuing to threaten to cut off federal aid to the victims of these fires, in what appears to be an effort to support all the above.
“Photographing the Woolsey Fire, I watched people flee for their lives, only to later realize they’d just lost everything,” says Stuart Palley, who took the photo on top of this article. “It’s unimaginably cruel to exploit these tragedies for any political gain. Let alone to do so for a cause that will make fires like these more common, and more destructive.”
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Outdoor News columnist Tony Peterson joins Rapid Fire host Rob Drieslein for Episode 4. Rob and Tony cover topics including the results of the 2019 Minnesota and Wisconsin deer season, the end of antler point restrictions in southeast Minnesota, and the big changes to the spring wild turkey hunt in Minnesota.
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