The Essential Camping Cooking Method Every Outdoor Traveler Should Know

It's interesting to think about how we modern humans need to go willingly out of the way to do what our ancestors did every day just to survive. We're talking about sleeping outside, cooking and chatting around the fire, peering into the darkness and thinking about predators and death — all within a quarter mile of our car, of course. But even with plenty of outdoorsy people poking around forests and sleeping in tents, certain knowledge gets lost. Like, how do we even cook without a hob or grill, anyway? And we don't mean marshmallows on sticks. Enter modernity's solution to an ancient problem: aluminum foil.

Similar in principle to banana leaf cooking in countries like Malaysia, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, aluminum foil cooking involves wrapping food in a foil packet and chucking it on the fire. Ok, maybe not on the fire, but over the fire, meaning you'll need a stand of some type. Some folks go all-in on this method to make gnocchi with tomato-parmesan sauce, sausage-and-mussel paella (properly seasoned with saffron, no less), tofu-and-broccoli stir fry, lemon Dijon salmon, Tex-Mex white bean and veggie packets, and even grilled banana boat desserts with marshmallows and graham crackers. Let's be honest: That's better than what some people eat at home.

The trick is to use individually wrapped aluminium foil packets. You need to prep them ahead of your camping trip, add your seasonings to the food, or keep them separate in small baggies or containers. Then, bring whatever stand you might need for your fireplace (like a cast-iron pan), and you're good to go. You'll make all of our ancestors' ghosts seethe with jealousy. Just make sure to take all your trash with you. "Leave no trace," as the phrase goes.

The extra cool thing about using aluminum foil to cook is that it's versatile enough to suit any situation. Headed off on a brutal, remote, completely not beginner-safe trek that involves some serious mountain scaling? Bring your foil packet. Headed to a beach-side camping area like Indianola, Texas? You've got your foil. Pair the foil packet method with a simple, four-item French press coffee set-up, and you can make a spectacular potato-and-eggs breakfast with actually good coffee. And bonus: You can snub your nose at all those hoity-toity glampers who just can't hack it. Just know what to do if you see a bear. They like food, too.

Fun fact: Aluminum foil will not burn because it has a very high melting point of over 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, which your campfire or portable stove cannot reach. Interestingly, cooking with foil while camping may also spark ideas for cooking with foil at home. The same method of packing food in foil applies, except you're putting it on your stove. You could also use foil in the backyard when grilling, which ought to be a fairly well-known tactic.

Heck, you could even get the best of both indoor and outdoor worlds by cooking with foil in your RV at a campsite and then eating outdoors, anyway. Or, you could actually cook outdoors at a campfire in an RV park (taking campsite rules and standard etiquette into account) simply because it's fun, before retiring to your RV to sleep. The possibilities are endless. Even without RVs, there's a reason why so many global cultures took to the banana leaf cooking method. It just works. Sadly, using foil won't impart the same leaf-infused flavors into the food, but ah, well. You can try that next time.