Campfire Cooking

Let's Get the Fire Started

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This chapter is extensive and so I have split it into two sections. It serves several important purposes. First, it signals the start of the chapters which lay out the various OOEE ideas that I want to present to you. Secondly, for those of you that need it, this chapter covers some of the most important skills and competencies for cooking over an open fire and understanding the basic needs for getting outfitted for campfire and ember cooking. These capabilities will be needed for tackling all the OOEE’s that call for the use of a campfire. Ultimately, I want to provide some references and resources to help you learn about the core practices on which campfire cooking events are founded.

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Core Practices

The essence of campfire cooking is knowing how to deal with these core practices:

• Setting up the fire pit

• Collecting fuel; tinder, kindling and firewood

• Production of cooking embers

• Managing the cooking and the fire’s heat output

The section on Setting Up the Fire Pit has quite a lot of detail. This is because of the various types of campfire cooking configurations and the cooking hardware that they use. Once we have a basic understanding of the equipment and some core practices, we can then look for proven campfire cooking recipes and get some meals made. Later on, we’ll move up the challenge scale and select an OOEE that requires a campfire. But before we can jump into discussing these topics, there are a bunch of requisites that we need to get out of the way, first. We’ll start with these practices:

• Common sense precautions and campfire control

• Leave no trace

• Mound fires

• Fire pans

• Fuel transport regulations

• Various fuel types

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