Cook Like a Hobo

by Nicole Kimberling

Fri 16 Jan 2026 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read | Leave a Comment

This is LCRW Cooking Columnist Nicole Kimberling’s seventh column for LCRW originally published in LCRW 33.

I think almost all of us have, at one point or other, attempted to cook with a campfire only to discover that our skills fall far below modern expectations. So, what makes the campfire so difficult? I cooked in a restaurant with a wood-fired oven for over a decade, which means I spent hundreds, perhaps even thousands of hours igniting, tending and using cooking fires.

Here are the main difficulties:

• Fires are hot. A camp-sized fire can still singe all the hair off your arms from six feet away.
• Fires are unpredictable. Even if you cook with a wood fire every day for years it is still hard to know how the wood will burn or what sort of bed of coals will develop.
• Fires are time-consuming. They take ages to mature and require much more fuel that you imagine they will to maintain.
• Fires are dangerous. They cannot be switched off and can easily extend beyond the boundaries that you, in your human hubris, have blithely decided they will be content to respect.

By any modern measure, making and cooking with a fire is unnecessary and fraught with difficulty. And yet who really wants to not build a fire when camping? For some the primal act of lighting a fire is the primary reason to venture out of doors.

I suggest that the modern campfire is more linked to the social-bonding aspect of bonfire than it is to the chuck wagon. So my first piece of advice is this: unless you’re very serious about cooking, or historical re-enactment, stick to roasting marshmallows and fully-cooked hot dogs on sharpened sticks. You’ll avoid burns and the threat of food-borne illness while still being able to enjoy the taste of wood smoke. And you’ll have fun finding and sharpening the sticks.

But if you are among the few with a genuine interest in cooking with an open flame, first prepare yourself by reversing one idea—that you are in control. Because with an outdoor fire you are always only partially in control. Apart from inconsistencies in how different sorts of wood burn, there is this thing called “weather” that affects both the fire and you. Rain is annoying, but wind is the thing that is most dangerous to you, your culinary masterpiece and the fate of the surrounding area.

But I can tell that you are not the sort of reader who will be deterred by anything so paltry as drudgery, difficulty or danger. So here is a recipe for how to make dinner with a campfire.

Step Zero: Decide what you want to make and buy food and equipment for whichever you choose. The easiest way and cheapest to genuinely cook with a fire is by using hobo packets.

Armed with heavy-duty aluminum foil, meat and potatoes, hobos mastered the en papillote cooking method long before the average home cook dared to work with fancy French techniques.

To make a hobo packet, use foil to make an envelope into which you insert an assemblage of food items, such as chopped bacon with diced potatoes or zucchini with oregano, canned chickpeas and feta. Each packet should contain around one pound of food and be the size of a paperback novel. Make sure to seal them tightly, by folding the edges over a few times. Hobo packets are buried in the coals of a fire, seam side up, to cook. Cooking time varies depending on what you put inside and how big the pieces of food are, but it’s rarely shorter than 30 minutes. Things like meat and potatoes can take as long as an hour to reach a state of edibility.

If you choose to attempt to cook using a skillet, then I salute you! But remember that you will need to purchase additional equipment, such as a spike or spider to elevate the skillet above the coals, and make sure to bring a lid, as stray flames can easily ignite the contents of your pan. Cooking with a skillet over a bed of coals is much the same as cooking with a gas burner that’s three to four feet tall. Finding the correct distance away from the flame is crucial. Experimentation will be necessary. Failure or partial failure is likely. But freeing yourself from the dreary ease of modern life was the reason you came into the woods in the first place, wasn’t it?

Last in the cooking methods comes the Dutch oven. These are lidded casseroles that are the cast iron equivalent of a hobo packet in that they are buried in coals. However, be advised that the Dutch oven requires a deep bed of mature coals to cook its contents, so the fire must have been going for a couple of hours before any cooking can be attempted.

Step One: No matter what method you chose, make sure that, on your way out of town, you stop to buy some flame-resistant gloves and the longest set of tongs you can find. Remember that your hand is made of meat and will also cook if exposed to flame. Protect it.

Step Two: Take and read the pamphlets about fire safety that they have at the ranger station or entrance to the campsite. Make sure to build a fire that will not cause an enormous conflagration requiring the intervention of smoke jumpers.

Step Three: Compose yourself and internally seek a zen space. Building, tending and cooking with this fire will take several hours and leave you streaked with smoke and ash.

Step Four: Build the fire. Once the initial fuel has been reduced to a bed of coals and new fuel added to create some flame, begin to cook.
By now you should have developed a relationship with the fire itself. Most likely you’ve been talking to it all day. You may have even named it. That’s normal—even necessary. At the restaurant we called it things like The Devil, Sweet Baby, Smoky, Firecracker, Snaggletooth, Slowpoke or simply That Bitch.

Whatever you name your fire, don’t worry if it doesn’t obey you. Slavish compliance is not in its nature. Just be in the moment with it, and maybe you’ll be able to coax it into helping you make dinner.

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