Great campfire meals are the champagne family camping experience at any campground! Yet the majority of campers manage hotdogs or marshmallows on the fire but have limited success with proper meals or more difficult to cook proteins like chicken. Our concern, therefore, has to be de-mystifying the delight one gets from food cooked on an campfire. So get your taste buds salivating and settle in to a trail of basic tips to appetizing, tasty pleasures. As we begin, though, we remind you that the possibility of fire bans in a given campground at any time requires that you also travel with a camp stove..
The first thing you will want to do is build a cooking fire. Most campgrounds provide a fire pit and even a grate or grill upon which they would like you to cook. You will likely find, however, that the grating provided by the campground is dirty and more than a little rusty. Using it exclusively to grill food would certainly result in unappealing if not unhealthy food. So bring your own metal grill. It should have a larger surface than the volume of food you expect to have on it at any time. Extra surface area allows you to move food to the edges of the grill thereby creating an "off the direct heat" space that is useful in cooking without burning the food.
A larger grill will also enable the campfire to be smaller and in better control when confined to the back or center of the provided area. Indeed, a campfire made of hardwood burned down to coals need not be large to be exceedingly hot where one made from softwood will produce a greater volume of ashes rather than coals and will be less hot for cooking purposes. Hardwoods are oak, maple or fruit trees to name a few while pine is an example of a softwood.. Almost all campgrounds will have a hardwood supplier nearby or perhaps even circulating within the grounds daily. Or there may be dead falls in nearby woods you can pick up. Remember, apart from the prohibition on cutting down trees in most campgrounds, fresh cut standing timber makes a crummy campfire if you can even get it lit before you run out of matches!
