We find ourselves cooking on embers on a regular basis, generally for a group of around 10 to 12. We’ll use embers where we want heat rather than flame. Sometimes that might be cooking something simple like jacket potatoes, but we often cook with embers in combination with roasting a joint of meat in a ground oven to make a roast dinner. In this case we’ll cook roast potatoes in one dutch oven and roasted vegetables in another. Depending on the time of year we’ll also cook up a crumble on the same embers.
It often takes more embers than you might imagine to cook. As an example, for a roast we’ll build a criss-cross fire (think jenga tower) that‘s around 60 – 70 cm each side and almost as high. It’s a lot of firewood. When you’re building your tower make sure that the material in any one layer is the same condition and the same thickness to try and reduce the chance of it burning unevenly and toppling over. If there’s a strong wind, it’ll often burn unevenly and fall over so make sure that the fire can’t spread and everyone’s out of the way.
For other dishes such as jacket potatoes or pizzas we’ll use far less fuel but the technique is the same.
Generally, we’ll leave a gap down the centre of the second row from the bottom and pack that gap with tinder. Normally we’ll use thinner sticks for the third row so they ignite easier.
Once it’s going the fire burns fiercely and quickly. Typically, within 45 minutes it’s gone, but has produced a load of embers for cooking on.
Often, we’ll keep a fire going alongside so that new embers are being produced so we can maintain the temperature.
Here you can see we’ve put the dutch oven in the embers and also shovelled more embers on the top so that the potatoes are getting heat from top and bottom. For jacket potatoes, we’ll bury them in the embers. For a pizza we’ll go with fewer embers but again on the top and bottom of the dutch oven.
We look at cooking on embers on our 5 Day Bushcraft Course as well as the 2 Day IOL Bushcraft Competency Award course.
You can see photos from these courses on our Facebook page.
