Backwoods: Cooking Fires

As a general rule, fire making woods that are good for making friction fires make bad firewood, since they are low density and has no resin. The best woods include oak, hickory, madrone, manzanita, mesquite, and other dense hardwoods. The worst woods include pine sapwood and many other softwoods and willow, although these make good kindling. Wet wood burns cooler than dry wood, but burns relatively longer. Hard wood burns hotter than sapwood in general. Rotten wood is good for producing smoke, but not heat or light. Charcoal burns hotter than the wood it was made from as the volatile gases which produce flames burn at a relatively low temperature. So the coals are the hottest part of the fire, not the flames. Light comes from the burning gases. The firewood you can actually get always burns better than the firewood you wish you had, but you'll need more of the poor stuff. Think of wood as calories. Better wood has more calories per piece, so can do more work.

The easiest, but slowest way to get a bed of coals is to build a huge log fire and wait a few hours. This takes the least effort and the most wood. To get quick efficient coals, burn small pieces of wood. In the Scouts, the rule was to find wood (or split it into pieces) the diameter of your thumb. The wood were neatly stacked next to the fire and added as needed to maintain a constant temperature. When cooking directly on the coals, the new wood is added at one end of the fire and the coals are pushed down into the cooking area. If you are using wood that doesn't make coals, you need to add pieces often to maintain any heat.

Fire pit construction varies according to weather conditions, wind direction, what and how much you are cooking and the type of fire wood that is available. Once your fire is started the two important things to manage are fuel and air flow. If you are building a fire in a windy place such as the grassy plains, you need to dig out a deep fire well.

The extreme version of this requires two holes dug about a foot deep and a foot apart. They are connected at the bottom by a tunnel. A pot or grill can be placed over one hole, while the other provides access for fuel and air. The grassy plains fire is also very efficient, requiring less fuel, as almost all the heat is put to work. Moderately windy conditions can be handled with a wind screen of rocks or logs.

My standard cooking fire is dug down about four to ten inches, depending on soil type and wind. If the wind is not too strong, line up the pit so the breeze flows parallel to it. Make sure the wind isn't blowing the smoke to where you want to sit while you cook. The pit is then lined with the flattest and driest stones I can find, including the bottom. Stones that contain moisture tend to explode as the water becomes steam. The stones come up another four to six inches above ground level.

If I am going to do a pit roast, another, deeper pit is dug a foot or so past one end of the main fire, and the hump of dirt between the two is not rock covered. Pit ovens should be dug deep and wide enough to accommodate a stone lining and a green vegetation lining as well as the food. The area between can be used to generate coals to replenish the cooking area, heat rocks for stone boiling or covering the baking pit. The length of the fire varies according to the number of people cooking, the width is from one and a half to two and a half feet. One or two people can easily cook on an 18" round fire.

CAUTION- always examine the soil in and around your fire. If it is organic, full of roots and other burnable stuff, then build a fire on top of rocks, bedrock if possible. Seal off your fire from the flammable material and really drench the fire when you leave so you won't have to explain your foolishness to a firefighter later on.