OUT OF THE BOX
CAMPFIRE
WIZARD Meet Australia’s best open-fire chef. Harry Fisher’s new book, Fire to Fork, is the bible of adventure cooking.
Book extract
For years I would sift through blogs, recipe books, YouTube videos and magazines looking for campfire cooking ideas and I was constantly met with the same sorts of things: hipsters cooking on fire but buying their ingredients in Narnia, or celebrity presenters making variations of the same pre-packaged, bland camp meals (inevitably on a gas burner). I was getting pretty frustrated, so I stopped reading what was out there for campers and started adapting recipes from proper chefs so that anybody could cook them over a fire outdoors. In doing so, I established a few rules:
1 Only use ingredients I can buy from a butcher and a supermarket— no more activated avocados and vegan bacon sprinkles from hipster shops.
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All ingredients should travel well—san choy bow is delicious, but good luck keeping a lettuce leaf in good condition on a corrugated road.
If possible, use the long-life alternative— while most of my recipes are ideal for short getaways, there are also plenty that will work on a three-week desert trip.
Conserve water, which means conserve pots—I try to use as few different implements and vessels as possible to reduce washing up.
Everything is cooked on fire. These rules were simply the formalisation of what I was already doing, but they have helped simplify my cooking and planning process a lot, and will do the same for you.
