CAMPING THE KIWI WAY

Early in our relationship, my partner Graham gave me a camp oven for Christmas. He thought it was a very practical gift as we were about to head off camping. However, I wasn’t impressed with getting ‘a pot’ for my Christmas present.

Years later, I have quite a different view about camp ovens. We carry two camp ovens (two different sizes — 10 inch and 12 inch) in our caravan and use them for a multitude of cooking purposes. When we go away in our trailer yacht we take the camp ovens with us.

Camp ovens are designed for cooking on a fire, but they can also be used on gas burners. You can use a camp oven to cook everything from stews and curries to roasts, bread, cakes and puddings. I’ve included a couple of recipes that I put together on our most recent trip from the ingredients I had available (p27). Both were cooked in my smaller camp oven on a gas cooker.

Camp ovens are essentially large cast metal pots. 

Originally, they were made from cast iron but more recently have also been made from aluminium. Some camp ovens have legs you can screw into their base so you can set them in the embers of a fire. Alternatively, you can place your camp oven on a wire grate or rocks in the fire. Our camp ovens are New Zealand-made but there are similar imported products available which are probably just as good.

The lid of a camp oven has a ridge around the edge so that embers from the fire can be stacked on the lid to help cook the top of a cake or bread.

I recommend that if you are cooking something like a cake or bread that you use a trivet (a rack or upturned metal plate) to elevate the cake tin from the bottom of the camp oven. This will reduce the possibility of burning the bottom of the cake or bread. By the way, roast potatoes cooked in a camp oven over the fire are particularly yummy. When roasting, it is good to jam a small stick between the pot and lid to create a gap to let steam out.

In the past as a sea scout leader, I had lots of fun showing our scouts the versatility of camp ovens. At our camps the scouts cooked mostly over fires. We introduced camp ovens so that the scouts had a large pot for cooking meals like stews and something in which to keep their food warm while they were finishing cooking their meals. Over time, I taught them to cook cakes and bread in the camp ovens and they also used them for awesome stews and desserts that they created themselves.