Campfire Cooking: Thermal Principles and Tools for Success
Are you the kind of person who spends most of your time packing for a camping trip on the food? Do you take more than one cooler into the woods with you? Are you of the opinion that all food cooked outside is intrinsically tastier than food cooked indoors? If so, you’re in good company! Making a juicy steak, some fluffy flapjacks, or a tender pork loin in the wild is fun and rewarding, but it can also be difficult. Campfire cooking—or any live-fire cooking—can be a bit of a crapshoot. Between the unpredictability of the fire itself and the strange hotspots that can occur, cooking food right can be a challenge. But with the right tools, it gets much easier—and much better. In this post, we will show you what tools to use and how to use them with confidence in a wood-fired cook. Let’s get into it!
Fire-cooking tools and how to use them
A grate or a pan
We have written before about cooking steaks directly on the coals—caveman style. And while that’s fun and tasty, it’s not the only (or necessarily best) way to cook out on burning wood. A grill grate of some kind—be it expanded metal welded into a frame or a purpose-built grill top—or a griddle/plancha is essential.
How you suspend your cooking device over the fire is going to be a matter of experimentation. If you’re cooking over a fire in your backyard in a fire pit, you may do it one way. If you’re camping out of an RV in the mountains, you may choose to (or have to) make a support out of rocks. Use your ingenuity!
Some hand tools for outdoor cooking
Don’t forget tongs, spatulas, etc. It seems like fun to try to turn your steak with a couple sticks you whittled down, but not when a perfect medium rare is on the line!
Also, remember a shovel, or something like it. You’ll be moving coals and burning logs around, and a small spade will make that much easier. Bring some hot pads or some welder’s gloves—they will help prevent burns when you inevitably have to change things mid-cook.
Thermapen ONE—essential
Being outdoors doesn’t negate the requirements of food safety. Foodborne illness is no way to enjoy the outdoors. But making sure your food is properly cooked is more than just knowing that it’s safe to eat—an overcooked chicken breast is safe but by no means enjoyable to eat. Cooking to temperature matters just as much out there as it does in the kitchen.
And Thermapen ONE is the all-star, go anywhere, do anything thermometer for indoor or outdoor cooking. An instant-read thermometer that is fast and accurate is important because other thermometers just can’t handle some cooking situations. Cooking over a live fire can cause flareups and even constant temperatures that are too high for the cables and transition of most leave-in probe thermometers. You can get in, get the temp, and get your hand out of the heat in record time with Thermapen ONE’s one-second full readings without burning your knuckles
If you’re only going to use one thermometer on your campout/cookout, this is the ONE to use! Super high accuracy, super speed, and super versatility make it the necessary instrument for any cook—no matter where.
Plus, the automatic backlight will help you know your temps even if the sun has gone down. Nice.
An infrared thermometer
This is a tool that may not seem essential, but if you want the best food, you’re going to need one in your kit. An infrared thermometer like the Industrial IR with Circle Laser (IRK-2) can’t tell you what temperature your food is inside, but it can tell you all about your cooking surface. The temperature of your cooking surface will be affected by several factors—how hot the coals are burning, how many there are, how far from the heat your surface is, how thick it is, its material, and the ambient air conditions. That’s a lot to freehand.
An infrared thermometer will tell you how hot the griddle or grill is before you try to sear that fresh-caught trout from the stream. If it’s not hot enough to sear it, put more coals underneath or move the pan closer to the heat. Don’t be disappointed by an underwhelming sear—get your cast-iron up to temp! (Check out our post on choosing an IR thermometer for more on how IR thermometers work and which one to choose.)
Leave-in probe thermometer
It may seem strange to say that a leave-in probe thermometer is useful in wood-fired cooking, but only if you lack imagination and drive. Say you want to cook a tomahawk steak after a long hike? Or what if you’re cooking over a wood fire in your backyard and want to lounge inside while your spatchcocked chicken roasts on the Sant Maria grill? While you do need to be careful about how your probes are interacting with the heat, there is plenty of room for them in this type of cooking.
A ChefAlarm or Smoke X2 will help if you go for a bigger, slower cut or are doing a two-step cooking process. And if you’re cooking something particularly slow, the receiver on your Smoke X2 will allow you to wander down to the creek while keeping an eye on your cook.
Tips for wood-fire cooking
Now we’ve cov ered the tools, what about the methods? This is not going to be a comprehensive look at the methods people use—you could fill several books with those—but let’s take a look at some basics to get you going cooking better with fire.
First, the fuel.
Woods for cooking over fire
What wood is best for cooking over a fire? With some exceptions, it’s the wood you have on hand. If you’re living in the hardwood forests of the Midwest and East, your wood choice will be an embarrassment of riches—hickory, sugar maple, oak, ash, walnut. Any of these will do wonderfully. So will beech, boxelder, or any fruitwood you can get. Cottonwood is plentiful near streams and rivers in many parts of the country, but now you’ll be feeding your fire a lot, as it has a low caloric density.
The only woods to be wary of are the resinous conifers. Pine, fir, and spruce can give your food a piney, resinous, creosote flavor that is suboptimal. But if you burn them down well first and cook over their coals, even those will probably be ok. Just don’t use them for fiery sears.
Woodfire cooking: flame or coals?
The state of your fire is going to depend on how you can set up your cooking surface. If you are able to elevate the food using a swing grill or a stand for the grate, you can have some actual flames in your fire. You’ll just need enough distance that you aren’t getting ashy kisses from the flames themselves and that you are not charring your food to an immediate crisp.
(Not all live-fire cooking is done at a campsite. Santa Maria-style grills are becoming more and more popular, bringing wood-fired cooking to the backyard as well. These grills have built-in cranks to elevate or lower the food to adjust the proximity to flame.)
Making a cooking zone for the coals
In general, unless you have special equipment that allows for adding height to your cook, you’re going to be cooking over coals. If you have a fire ring made of rocks, build an extension onto it with rock “walls” that are wide enough to support your pan or grill grate. Burn wood in the main part of your pit, then rake or shovel the coals over into your cooking zone under your food. Keep burning fresh wood and moving it under your food to keep the temperature going long and high enough.
the wood doesn’t have to be completely burned down. Much like cooking with charcoal, once the wood is ashy all over with white spots covering the log/branch, move it under the food. A good medium limb or two can keep your cooking going for some time this way.
Adjusting the temperature of your cook
Getting your cooking surface to an exact temperature while cooking in a pan propped up on rocks over a bed of coals is not an exact science. Use your tools (IRK-2) and judgment to decide how close to an ideal temperature you have to be, then adjust your arrangement to achieve something in the right zone. As we’ve alluded to above, you are going to adjust the temperature by changing the height of your pan or grill above the heat source and by adjusting how much of that heat source is available. If things get too hot, shovel some coals out from under your food. If you notice a hotspot that is too extreme, move things around to fix it. Of don’t, and use that hotspot as a tool for faster searing, etc.
Cooking outdoors is fun. And it can be challenging. But even with (perhaps because of?) those challenges, it is extremely rewarding. Slicing into a stuffed pork loin out in the woods, or presenting your friends each with perfectly medium-rare steaks (that rival or beat steakhouse fodder) after a long day of hiking gives you a feeling of accomplishment that is unique and hard to find elsewhere. Get out into the outdoors and give it a shot. Take your Thermapen ONE and maybe some other ThermoWorks gear and see what kind of amazing food you can make in the beauty of nature. Happiest cooking!