Cuisine Adventures in the Wilderness
- Jim Chamberlin
- Sep 11
- 6 min read
I started going to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) over fifty years ago with my parents. Our trips began as one week adventures, and as my father accumulated more vacation time, our trips became longer. The longest trip was three weeks when I was in my late teens. We ran low on food, couldn’t catch any fish, and we had to ration food the last few days of the trip. Since then, I’ve never counted on fish or game for sustenance when backcountry camping.
Breakfast Stew
There are few things I find more relaxing than enjoying a hot cup of campfire coffee at daybreak in the wilderness. Of course, this takes some planning, as one needs to get up early enough to start a fire and get the percolator up to a boil before the sun begins to brighten the day. Morning is my favorite time of day, and a good breakfast makes for the start of a great day.
A delicious staple for backcountry meals is breakfast stew. This hearty meal starts with cooking wild rice for 10- 15 minutes, then adding flax seed, bulgur wheat, and dehydrated apple slices. After another 7- 10 minutes I add enough thick cut oats to thicken, then season with cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, and a generous amount of butter. Nuts and raisins are typically served on the side with rehydrated milk, and maple sugar. I was on a trail clearing trip with seven people I’d never met, and was charged with cooking breakfast. I received a lot of skeptical looks when I told them the night before that we were having breakfast stew the next morning. They nervously watched as I made it that morning, and then ate all of it–well over a gallon.
Maple Syrup from Maple Sugar
Speaking of maple sugar, this is the real deal. We just discovered how to turn syrup to sugar about ten years ago and usually make a gallon or two of sugar every spring at the end of syrup season. Maple sugaring was the most common method of preservation historically. Sugar doesn’t spoil or need special canning equipment. Just bring the syrup to hard candy temp, around 250 degrees then stir in a wooden bowl until it turns to sugar. Or you can cheat and use a mixer.
Maple sugar is easily converted to syrup by adding boiling water at one part water to two parts sugar. For years I used half brown and half white sugar at the same ratio to make “syrup,” but nothing beats maple tree sap for flavor.
My favorite thing to use maple syrup on is buckwheat pancakes. We make our own mix with freeze dried eggs, butter, and milk that we buy bulk. Most any from-scratch buckwheat pancake recipe will do. Bacon will keep for a few days, even during warm weather, and frying pancakes in bacon fat is hard to beat. This summer we pulled into a campsite to find a large juneberry bush covered with ripe fruit. Buckwheat pancakes, cooked over an open fire in bacon grease, with fresh juneberries and real maple syrup…need I say more?
Winter Tip: Frozen Eggs
I’ve done a few winter trips to the BWCAW as well, most often when we had a sled dog team. Winter allows you to bring just about anything you want as far as food. Eggs work good in the winter, because frozen eggs don’t break all over your backpack. I also discovered that it works great to fry a frozen egg. Just dip it in hot water for a few seconds to loosen and remove the shell, then place in a frying pan over a medium fire. As the egg thaws, it spreads out to where you can flip it and end up with a great over easy egg.
Gourmet Dinner Over the Fire
The first question I typically get asked when I tell someone I just returned from a BWCAW trip is, “How was the fishing?” I usually respond with something like “The fishing was good, but the catching could have been better.” Though I’ve done a fair share of fishing in my life, I’m not that good at it, and it usually takes a back seat to “making camp” and cooking. I love good food, and it’s never better than when cooked over an open fire in the wilderness.
Freeze Dried Ingredients Are the Secret Sauce
When we do catch fish, one of my favorite things to make with it is fish tacos. I bread and fry the fish in lard, and serve with rehydrated salsa, coleslaw, and refried beans on a soft tortilla. If the weather is somewhat cool, we can bring some cheese to put on it as well. The salsa and refried beans rehydrate nicely, but the rehydrated coleslaw is the key to a killer wilderness fish taco. As a backup, I usually bring some freeze dried meat on the chance the fishing is better than the catching. It doesn’t weigh much if you end up not needing it and have to pack it out.
We often travel to the BWCAW in the shoulder seasons. October is my favorite month to go. The crowds are gone by then, as are the bugs, and you can chase grouse as well as fish. The cooler months also allow you to bring food that would otherwise not keep. Often I will bring a ham hock to boil down to stock for bean soup or scalloped potatoes.
A prepared mixture of freeze dried butter, and milk, with seasonings, dehydrated onions, and mushrooms makes for great scalloped potatoes. We par boil and dehydrate cull potatoes from the garden to use for this and breakfast hash browns. The only bad part is the bone from the hock, which should be packed out, unless you have a dog that typically gets bones to chew it up. You can help them with this by crushing it with a rock or the back of a hatchet so they can chew it up faster.
The Invention of the Pizza Ball
Everyone loves a pizza party, and being in the wilderness is no excuse to not have one. We make a simple pizza dough mix of flour, salt, and yeast to bring along, so all you have to do is add water and olive oil. Make sure to not use too much yeast, as you want a thin crust. Bread flour is a must.
To make the sauce, we use the tubes of tomato paste, thinned out and seasoned to taste. For toppings we rehydrate peppers, mushrooms, onions, or other veggies, along with pepperoni and cheese. Flatten out the dough, the thinner the better, then place on a hot griddle with olive oil, cook for a few minutes until the bottom is slightly cooked, flip it over, add sauce and toppings, then cover with a lid or metal plate and cook until the crust is crisp and the cheese is melted.
The first time I tried this I used a non coated pan, and by the time I got it out of the pan it was a ball of gooey, cheesy, saucy mess. I was going to feed it to the dog, but we’d been traveling all day and the grandkids were starving, and they were having no part of that. They still talk about the pizza ball, and how good that was!
Crumb Cakes Need a Good Fire
Years ago we had a reflector oven, a triangular shaped device with a shelf in the middle that would face the fire and you could bake brownies, cakes, and other sweet treats. I remember one trip where we hit the peak of blueberry season and my Mom made a blueberry crumb cake that was to die for. The trick to using a reflector oven is a fire that provides consistent heat.
One of the biggest learning curves to cooking over a fire is building a good fire, and for a good fire you need good firewood. In the BWCAW, black spruce or jack pine are two of my favorites, or mountain maple if you can find it. Stay away from large trees, balsam fir, and paper birch, though birch bark is the best fire starter. You’ll need a good saw and hatchet, keeping safety first. Harvest wood well away from the campsite and shoreline. And always, yes always, leave some for the next group.
So next time I say I just returned from the BWCAW, you can ask me how the fishing was, and I’ll give you my standard reply. Or you can ask me what new dish I cooked over the fire, because that’s what I love; good food, cooked over a fire, shared with good friends and family, in a beautiful wilderness setting.
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