works of wanderlust

Tag: campfire

  • a’la plancha

    It’s Friday afternoon and it turns out that you really can learn something new every day. For example, while I was reading a new e-book that I had downloaded I also learned a new cast iron word.

    In fact, last night I was sitting in the truck waiting for my daughter to finish her dancing class for the night and was skimming through a PDF of The Backyard Fire Cookbook by Linda Ly (which you can pick up for a few bucks in this month’s Humble Bundle by the way… tho only if you’re reading this in May 2021. No affiliation.)

    The author’s introduction noted that (in her opinion) cooking over a campfire required three foundational pieces of cast iron: a dutch oven, a big pan, and a plancha.

    Pause.

    I’ll admit. That was a new word for me: plancha.

    So, of course, I temporarily closed the PDF, swiped open a browser window, and Google’d it.

    … to which a confusing selection of advertisements for griddles appeared on my screen.

    Um.

    As it turns out the English translation for what turns out to be the Spanish word plancha is iron.

    More specifically, and digging through more sites helped me discover this, the word plancha in reference to a cooking tool is a flat, iron griddle with shallow sides.

    Or, a big flat hunk of cast iron… and what I would have up until last night called a griddle.

    Even Google knew better.

    Not that griddle is a great word. I have a round griddle. I also have reversible griddle with grooves on one side and a flat smooth pancake-friendly surface on the other. I’ve a got a small griddle I put in my barbecue. And I even have an electric griddle (which I will mention as little as possible going forward.) Lots of griddles that have multiple different meanings even in my own kitchen.

    Plancha may be a new word for me, but it suits the specificity of the kind of griddle-like pan I tend to prefer: an oblong, squarish piece of flat iron that has a bit of a lip to keep the food from slipping off but is otherwise a big broad cooking surface.

    So. Friday afternoon and I have a new word to help me talk about one of my favourite topics. How’s your week going?

  • Backyard Ribs: Part Two, The Cook Up

    This past Saturday morning I woke up at 6am and (after letting the dog out and setting the coffee to brew) I went to work making dinner. That is to say, I peeled open a family pack of pork ribs and mixed up a dry rub.

    I wrote about it in part one of this article, an article that concluded unsatisfyingly with said ribs being wrapped in plastic and left in the fridge to rest.

    The results, and admittedly my first attempt to cook something as delicate and finicky as ribs on an open campfire, were decidedly mixed.

    The Cook

    Here’s how things went down between the application of the rub and the parade of meat to the kitchen table.

    The ribs rested for about seven hours in the fridge with the rub. Dinner plans, the clock, and impatience go the best of me, and I extracted the experiment around 330pm.

    Foil-wrapped and suspended on a wire rack over a baking sheet, the whole batch went into the oven on 250F for two hours. I had debated on the full outdoor cook approach versus the oven/fire mix and decided for my first attempt I’d focus on fire-smoked finish over battling with raw pork outdoors. Plus the weather had started to look a bit sketchy.

    At about 430 I set up the outdoor fire in the pit. This gave me lots of time to not only get some nice hot coals built up in the floor of the bowl, but I was able to run another full round of seasoning on the two cast iron grill plates that came with the fire pit. I’ll write about that later.

    Around 530, I pulled the ribs from the oven, brought them outside and started the finish cook over the fire.

    What Went Wrong?

    First, let me just say again that I was working off a lot of foundational cooking approaches here. I didn’t do a lot of research, made a few assumptions that I assumed would translate between gas grill and open flame, and got a little stubborn about sauce. Much of the advice out there is geared for people with expensive smokers or equipment I just don’t have… yet.

    So what went wrong?

    For one, the ribs had a lot more fat than I was expecting. I’m not sure if it was meat quality or if I should have knifed in a little better at 6am to trim some of the visible white stuff. I was hoping more of it would render off during the oven cook, but not everything did. As a result, the drippings would almost continuously fall into the lovely glowing coals below and flare into a small grease flame. At one point I actually moved the fire over so it was not directly below the ribs and tried to work off radiant heat but even the heat from the fire pit floor was causing flare ups. Suggestions for improvement came in the form of a comment on one of the photos I posted to a family chat where my father suggested using yellow mustard as a pre-coat to the dry rub. “It’s what the pros do to avoid flare ups.” He offered.

    The texture also wasn’t great. I was hoping for something closer to the tender meat one associates with ribs, but again, either something was off in my cook or the quality of the meat just wasn’t as high as I’d hoped. The results were a little bit chewier than I planned. This may require a little more prep of the meat for next time, an examination of my slow cooking approach, or just springing for some better quality meat.

    Another flaw was moisture. The rub provided a nice flavour, but a bit of char and my reluctance to cover up the rub flavour with a cheap barbecue sauce meant that the final results were on the crunchy and dry side. Next time I’m going to plan for a sauce or a glaze (but not one that comes from a bottle.)

    What Went Right?

    All that said, the meat was actually not terrible. It wasn’t the knock-your-socks-off-amazing was hoping for, but a solid 7 out of 10, family restaurant quality rib meal.

    Apart from the dryness, the rub brought a very nice flavour to the table. I’m catering to a spectrum of tastes, from my own personal like-it-spicy preference, to a teenage daughter who turns her nose at any spices that stray from basic salt-and-pepper or plain garlic toast levels. Compliments on that front all-round.

    Also the meat was cooked evenly. I have a probe thermometer that is one of those how-did-I-live-without-this tools and I made sure that the meat was actually cooked through to the appropriate temperature before serving. The mix of oven cook and fire finish helped no one get food poisoning. High praise for any meal, huh?

    It’s still barely May and the outdoor cooking season is barely begun.

    I’m loving my outdoor firepit and the bit of suburban firecraft I’m able to take on out my back door. Not every cook out is going to be amazing, but as I told my wife while we nibbled our fire-cooked ribs on Saturday evening, practice makes perfect and by the end of this summer I’m going to make sure I’ve had a lot of practice. Stay tuned!

  • Caged Flame

    It was Saturday afternoon and for the first time in a week there was nary a spot of snow in my backyard.

    We had some pork loin marinating in the refrigerator and my wife was all “I was just going to cook it in the oven but if it’s nice enough out there you could barbecue.”

    “Or I could try it over a fire.” I offered.

    “You could.” She was skeptical. “But you’re the one who has to sit out there and tend to it.”

    Despite the snow there have been a number of fire restrictions in place across the prairies.

    No open fires. No fireworks. But carefully tended pits are fine… provided certain rules are followed.

    Rules, such as using a fire screen cover atop your fire pit.

    Caging your flames.

    I cracked open a beer as the fire burned to a good base of hot coals. I’ve been working my way through a Grizzly Paw sampler pack since we visited the mountains last month and I picked up the beer right there at the microbrewery in Canmore.

    This afternoon’s selection was called the Three Sisters Pale Ale, named for the triple peak mountain range that stands guard over the townsite below, down where the beer is brewed.

    It was a fitting spring drink to complement the first burn of the new batch of firewood and a reward for hauling a cubic meter of logs from my driveway to the storage space behind the shed earlier this week.

    Let’s also call it the small makeup drink from the alcohol-free hangover I endured on Thursday, the morning after joining club AstraZenenca and priming up my immune system against a future COVID invasion. No regrets, but that vaccine wasn’t giving free rides to many.

    My caged flames burned down to a smoky bed of embers and I cautiously added a bit more wood and some charcoal to maintain the heat level.

    My low-smoke firepit and the so-called clean burning cedar is belching smoke into the neighbourhood and likely annoying my neighbours.

    I should really focus. Tend those wild flames and pay a little less attention to my can of cold, crisp pale ale brewed in the mountains.

    I should. It’s fine though.

    “The smoke smells kinda nice.” My wife says as she comes outside to check on the progress of the cook and his fire. “Better than that pine we had before.”

    “I guess.” I say, but smoke is smoke even if it smells less bad than other smoke.

    I would just invite the neighbours over for a beer. No one minds smoke as much with a beer in their hand. But that vaccine doesn’t really kick in for a couple more weeks and even more restrictive than the local fire rules are the pandemic ones.

    The pork loin hits the hot cast iron grates and the sizzling, spicy sounds fill the backyard and for a few minutes as I turn and prod and manage the heat against raw flesh I forget. Forget it all.

    The smoke.

    The neighbourhood.

    The disease ravaging the world.

    The cage is off, the flame unleashed, so that I can just cook.

  • firewood

    the fate of a tree brings a curious twist
    starting as seed
    on wind, through mist
    tucked into the soil
    spattered with rain
    sprouting and growing new heights to attain
    shrugging snow, budding leaf
    basking summers often brief
    sunlit evenings casting long shadows
    brilliant colours before even more snows
    year after year, decades pass, seasons withdraw
    until fate arrives
    as a wind
    or a flame
    or a saw
    to be hewn and moved
    lugged, logged and planed
    milled into geometrically linear grained
    lumber.
    or not.
    maybe nothing more than a log for a fire
    split
    axed
    set hot
    aflame and a flame to admire
    to warm hands
    hearts
    and cook sizzling food
    a curious twisting fate
    from tree to fire wood.

    – bardo

    A cubic meter of firewood landed on my front lawn yesterday and I spent well over an hour carting and stacking it while feeling a bit bittersweet on the fate of these trees to become fuel for my future backyard fires rather than, say, lumber for the doghouse that I built a couple weeks ago.

    I have reserved some space on this blog each week to be creative, and to post some fiction, poetry, art or prose. Writing a daily blog could easily get repetitive and turn into driveling updates. Instead, Wordy Wednesdays give me a bit of a creative nudge when inspiration strikes.

  • Can I use an outdoor grill or campfire to season my cast iron pan?

    Iron. Oil. Heat.

    These are the three foundational ingredients needed to season any cast iron pan.

    If you have a cast iron pan, a bit of oil, and a heat source then you should be able to season that pan. And so the simple answer is, yes, if your heat source is a campfire or a gas grill this would count and you should, most definitely, be able to season cast iron outdoors on a grill or other open flame.

    In fact, in my own experience, I’ve had some great luck seasoning cast iron both on the barbecue and over the fire while out camping. There are many practical benefits including dispersal of smoke, efficiency of the process, and the honest-to-goodness joy of sitting around a fire doing something as practical as seasoning your cookware.

    I’ve also had a couple bad experiences. So, a caveat…

    Cast Iron Guy Caveat: Fire and flame are less predictable than electric heat sources. And unpredictable heat can mean things might get a little too hot or too cool as you work to find the just right level of heat to achieve the best seasoning results.

    Too low heat means that the chemical reactions to create seasoning won’t happen and the oil will likely just get gummy and sticky and fail to properly polymerize to become seasoning.

    Too high heat means the oil and any established seasoning will likely burn and disintegrate leaving bare iron behind.

    Check out my article on using a self-cleaning oven to strip seasoning for a refresher on how different levels of high heat affect the seasoning on a pan. I wrote about some of the chemical properties of seasoning and how the blast furnace temperatures of self-cleaning modes torch seasoning to ash.

    Finding that just right heat in an oven somewhere in the middle of that too high and too low value is a matter of setting the knob to the just right number.

    Finding that just right heat on a campfire or over a gas flame is a trickier prospect and requires attention and care above the heat source, and definitely not just throwing it into the flames or coals and hoping for the best!

    While many things can go right, there is more wiggle room for things to go wrong: uneven seasoning, soot and ash contamination, over-heating and burning off the seasoning you’ve already created, increased difficulty to season handles or edges, or even in the extreme, possible cracking of your pan by moving it through too much temperature variation too quickly.

    So, with a good steady-burning bed of coals or a medium flame on your grill, a rack or grate to rest your pan above the heat, the right tools, the right oil, and with work and care, yes, you can season cast iron on a campfire or outdoor grill… but maybe start with a practice pan to learn.