Scout Cooking

[mattman578]

We found out the hard way one time when a scout brought individually packaged microwave burgers for a camp out

 

One scout master on here said that one boy brought frozen microwave pizza's to a camp out so this got me thinking as a Webeols den leader I was really excited when the case iron chef requirement came out I made my boys cook a meal while on the camping.  I gave them only two requirements they must stay in budget and it had to have more the three ingredients and not grilling.  Well we had egg burritos with the eggs cooked in plastic bags we had some camp chilie and taco pie and some really proud boys as they were only supposed to make food for the den but made enough for the hole camp to eat  !!! they asked me if they could cook again on there next camp out

[T2Eagle]

Most interesting was when an SPL who was trying to get the other guys to step up their game got together with one of the other older guys and laid out white table cloth, china, linen napkins and silverware.  He made a Thai chicken, coconut sauce dish.  It worked, the other patrols started putting more effort into their meals.

 

Maybe the best scout prepared meal I've had was a cedar planked salmon, the equivalent of some of the best and most expensive entrees I've ever been served in a restaurant.

 

One of my best scouts is an absolutely terrible cook, such that outside of completing his requirements his patrol doesn't let him anywhere near the stove.  We, meaning both myself and his troopmates, have worked with him plenty of times, he just genuinely seems to have no aptitude for it.

 

I earned a living as a cook for awhile, and I know it's considered heresy around here, but I don't care much for Dutch oven cooking.  Unless you're braising inexpensive less tender cuts of meat, almost anything that can be cooked in a Dutch oven can be cooked even easier using conventional pans and methods.

Edited September 22, 2015 by T2Eagle

[Eagledad]

I guess as a compromise between adult "strongly suggested rules" about nutrition in the meals. why not suggest at least one meal (rotate around: breakfast, lunch, supper) as a patrol potluck competition.  You eat your own creation but get a sample of everyone else's.  The adult "patrol" is part of the competition and can put out some better than average meals for the potluck and have copies of the recipes to pass around.  If the boys realize there are good things to eat out there, they'll make the appropriate changes.  I have collected recipes that are like super easy and yet feed a lot of people out of a Dutch oven or fry pan.

Our troop does this very thing at a troop meeting. You don't need to wait for a camp out. We also do a Thanksgiving feast on the November camp out. The troop cooks a couple turkeys and the patrols bring the sides aan desserts. You can see in everyone's faces that there is something special about a whole troop sitting together eating a meal near a fire. We go strait into songs and skits. Then after that, the scouts play night capture the flag. I have not been on the last few November camp outs, but that was a tradition the scouts developed over years. I hope they still do it.

 

Barry

[CalicoPenn]

One Scout made the most unappetizing looking yet tastiest blueberry pancakes I've ever had - he forgot to drain the blueberries before he added them to the batter - turned the pancakes a shade of green that could only be said to resemble a bruise - the saving grace is that the blueberries he bought were packed in blueberry juice and not just water.

 

We used dutch ovens almost exclusively for cobbler and stews - it wasn't that we weren't creative enough to cook other things but as T2Eagle said, most things are better cooked by other methods - and we really didn't want to do deep fat frying either.  However, I did cook up a chicken dish for my patrol that required a long cooking time in a dutch oven - bone in chicken thighs covered in tomato juice (yes, juice - not sauce) then cooked for an hour - after an hour, I added asparagus and onion and cooked for another hour until the tomato juice had been severely reduced to 1/4 or less of what was first added - and then all served on a bed of wild and brown rice.  Everyone loved the chicken - if I had to do it over again, I would use white rice - and the only complaint came from the patrol mate who got clean-up duty that night and had to clean the dutch oven (I helped him with it so he wasn't that mad). (btw - we didn't use charcoal, we used coals from the fire - if someone had suggested 4 charcoal briquettes down and 3 up, the old timers would have laughed him out of camp - things have certainly changed since the 1970's).

 

In our troop, patrols always cooked together, and the adults cooked their own meals.  One of our Scoutmasters tried to get us to think beyond spaghetti or burgers by having the adult meals include things like baked potatoes with steak, or roasts, or ham.  After a couple of campouts without us following the example, the SM asked the SPL why we didn't try cooking more like the adults and the SPL told him that they were cooking things that took a long time to cook and they had an advantage because they had someone who would stay at the campsite in the afternoon and start cooking at 3:30 or so while we were out and active and not usually starting our fires for supper until 5:00 or so which wouldn't give us time to bake a potato, let alone a roast.  An agreement was reached where the adults in camp would start the cooking of any food that took a long time to cook provided that it was all prepped and set-up and ready to pop on/in the fire by lunch - and we had less hot dogs and hamburgers for a while.

 

One of my favorites was to cover a cheap cut of roast, about 2-3 pounds, in a couple of pounds of moistened kosher salt then wrapped mummy like in cheesecloth which would also be moistened before being put directly into hot coals for a couple of hours (on coals then colas shoveled on top - replenish as needed).  When it was removed from the coals, the salt and cheesecloth would be hard enough to need to use a hammer to break it open - the meat inside would be perfectly seasoned - not too salty - and mely in your mouth tender.

[Twocubdad]

We do the Iron Chef thing about once a year. It's always a hit. A couple of winners which have gone down in troop lore are watermelon soup (watermelon, mushed up with powdered sugar) and meat medley which was all the hamburger, bacon, chicken and steak cooked together. What's not to like.

 

As to the rule making thing -- have you read the Guide to Advancement? Guide to Safe Scouting? Insignia Guide? Heck, the Boy Scout Handbook? Hundreds of pages of adult-dictated rules.

 

I've never bought into philosophy of a strictly Scout-led program. There is a fine line between Scout led and Scout led off into a ditch. I believe we adults are here to create the program within which the Scouts learn and practice leadership, cooking and many other things. There are limits to learning by example, controlled failure, directed self-discover and the like. I don't think any of you have mentioned any programs or techniques here our troop hasn't utilized. They're all great, a lot of fun for the boys, and work at some level. But they all have one major limitation -- they are all very easily undermined by a couple of the cool kids wandering into camp, munching on PopTarts and bragging to the other kids how cool they are because they "cooked" breakfast in two minutes, have no dishes to clean and now have time to wander around camp being cool. They can flush months if not years of work and effort by both youth and adults to build up quality of the troops meals. I've watched it happen several times. You can see the air come out of the program.

 

And in the five years Krampus's guy spent trying to pushing the program string uphill, how many Scouts didn't learn as much or have as robust program as they could have. Absolutely give them a chance to figure things out, to learn on their own and struggle to get it right. But five years?

 

Consequently, one of my early lessons as a new Scoutmaster is that an occasional, specific adult-dictated rule which corrects the course of the program is good thing.

 

No ramen noodles (unless used as an ingredient in something else)and no PopTarts. Period.

 

Six months later no one remembers who made the rule (SM or PLC) or cares. It becomes part of the troop culture and everyone goes on happily making their meat medley for dinner.

[ianwilkins]

Food! One of my favourite things!

 

I feel quite strongly about getting the kids to cook, most of our lot will disappear off to university come 18, end up in a shared house, meeting up with many of them years later, they often comment on how everyone else made such a fuss of the "house meals" being overwhelmed at cooking for 6 or 8 instead of 1. On most of our camps we've had central catering, with the duty team/patrol cooking for the whole camp, so cooking for 6-8 is easy compared to 30 or 40! Of course, this is usually done in more of a field kitchen than on open fires. We do also try and split them into patrol sized groups and cook on fires too.

 

I don't know if you have "Ready Steady Cook" on TV in america, in fact, I'm not sure it's on in the UK any more, bit of a daytime special these days, so if you're out at work you'll never see it, anyway, basic premise is two members of the public each bring a bag of ingredients and give them to a pro chef, the chef decides what to cook, then the two of them make it. We often do a similar thing, giving each team a few ingredients, then having staples like pasta rice and potatoes, herbs and spices, various tins of chopped toms, pulses, fresh veg, all there for them to take.

 

Most bizarre meal that actually worked was one lot did bacon and tuna in a creamy sauce with pasta. Looked fairly grim, tasted pretty good though. Caramel peas I'd be happy to never try again, and I think we may have had to throw away the billy that was cooked in!*

 

Once I managed to get a chef mate to come along and give them hints and tips as they went along. That was a good night.

 

We have got into dutch oven cooking a fair bit in our unit, but we like to do it over a fire. There's something great about having your pot hanging from a chain over the fire, it's a good look. Counting out briquettes just seems too clinical, though we did end up doing that on summer camp, as we weren't allowed ground fires.

 

Also ran practice lightweight hiking stove cooking nights, testing prepacked meals, and making easy but tasty hike meals.

 

This term they've asked for a curry night. So we'll definitely do that.

 

One of our lads ended up with an apprenticeship at one of Heston Blumenthal's pubs, has he made it across the pond? Well it wasn't his high science michelin starred stuff, but it was more or less his dream job. Did we light the spark from his time in scouting? I wouldn't like to claim too much credit, but it certainly helped fan the flames for sure.

 

* No, we did manage to get it clean....eventually

 

Ian

[Hedgehog]

I earned a living as a cook for awhile, and I know it's considered heresy around here, but I don't care much for Dutch oven cooking.  Unless you're braising inexpensive less tender cuts of meat, almost anything that can be cooked in a Dutch oven can be cooked even easier using conventional pans and methods.

 

You should be roasted over the coals for that comment.  

 

We've made stew, chili, lasagna, baked ziti, beef short ribs, pork spare ribs, roast beef, chicken and biscuits, chicken cacciatori, apple pies, corn bread, chocolate layer cakes, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, monkey bread and lots more using Dutch Ovens.  Best resource is marksblackpot.com -- I love how each receipe is a story.

 

Our Troop provides the boy in charge of planning the menu (usually a 6th grader working on the T-1st requirements) an e-mail outlining what is expected along with the list of cooking gear in the patrol boxes.  The e-mail does have suggestions like pancakes and sausage, bacon and eggs or french toast for breakfast.  It also suggests sandwiches, chips / pretzels and fruit for lunch and suggests including PB&J as an option (we typically pack lunch and take it with us on our adventures).  For dinners, the e-mail has links to websites for Dutch Oven recipes, explains how to make Dutch Oven pasta (a troop favorite -- inexpensive and easy) and suggests a variety of meat options (sausage, meatballs, hamburgers, hot dogs, etc.) and dessert options (s'mores, dump cakes, etc.)  The boys plan the menu and shoping list.  The boys have a budget of $14 per scout ($3 for breakfast, $3 for lunch, $5 for dinner and dessert and $3 for breakfast).  The next step is  having older boys work with them in developing the menu -- thus eliminating the need for any adult involvement.

 

My son did the menu for his patrol (probably the third or fourth time)  last weekend-- breakfast was bacon and eggs, lunch was sandwiches, dinner was grilled steak (found some for $2 a steak) with an onion rub, pasta alfredo and green beans, dessert was a dump cake  and the next morning's breakfast was chocolate chip pancakes (made from leftover Hershey bars from the night before) and sausages.  We do have a lot of repetition on campouts -- the boys know how to make pancakes and eggs and the Dutch Oven pasta is a hit.  When the boy in charge of the cooking asked how to make it, one of the older boys steped up and said "I'll show him."  Dump cakes have become a tradition.

 

We're using the Cooking Merit Badge and the Adult Patrol to kick things up a notch.  At the cooking merit badge, I challenge the boys to be creative in their cooking.  We have 4 groups of two boys working together to each make a full dinner and we invite the parents to join us at the end of the day.  Some of the things they have cooked have been:

• Baby back ribs (in a DO) with cornbread (also in a DO), applesauce (made from fresh apples) and coleslaw followed by blueberry peach cobbler.
• Beef stew (DO) , buttered noodles, green beans followed by a two layer chocolate cake (DO)
• Beef ribs in tomato Sauce (DO), polenta, green beans followed by brownies (DO)
• Lasagne followed an apple pie (DO)
• Chicken caccaitori, fettuccine followed by cheese cake (DO)

The adult patrols cook something different on each campout and because the SPL and ASPL eat with us, the boys know what we have to eat.  My favorite so far was the strip steaks grilled over an open flame with sauteed onions (also cooked over an open flame in a cast iron frying pan), baked potatoes, green beans and warm bread (all cooked or warmed in foil).  I'm thinking of doing a turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing or grilled venison with blueberry sauce on the next campout. 

[Krampus]

I am the cooking merit badge counselor. Nothing in the rules that says the boy had to do it, but I challenged him for his "family meal" to think outside the box; pick something his family love and learn how to make it. It was pulled pork. Lent him my smoker, my thermometer, gave him Alton Brown's recipe book on BBQ and sent him on his way. That Saturday he emailed me a picture of his family sitting on their deck eating pulled pork sandwiches. Brought the leftovers by. Heaven!

[perdidochas]

There were only two requirements I ask from the scouts' on preparing meals: the meals needed to be nutritional,  and should be prepared (Prepared meaning that it doesn’t come straight out of a package like pop tarts or cereal). I preferred all meals be cooked depending on the camp out, but gave them the option for lunch. I want scouts to learn and grow from all their experiences, especially preparing and cooking good tasting food. My wife was amazed at the meals I could prepare when we first got married and just about all them were from my boy scouting experiences. 

 

I also agree that Sunday shouldn’t be a hurry up break camp day because it wrecks the cooking experience. I remember our Webelos being pulled from their tents on one Troop visit at 7:00 morning. The SM handed them a poptart and told them to eat and break camp at the same time. He wanted to get all the gear stowed back at the church storage before the first Sunday service. I asked him, why can't you wait until after church services are over. He said he never thought of that.  Our Troop rarely starts breaking camp before lunch.

 

Barry

 

The other side to it, is that if the Troop is a Catholic troop, the Catholic boys (and leaders) are obligated to go to Mass (Duty to God for the Catholic boys). He may be trying to get them there for Mass. Luckily, we have a Catholic Church locally that has a 7 pm Sunday night Mass. 

[DuctTape]

In my opinion dutchcovens are easy. Plus they pack terribly. Far too often DO cooking is perceived as the pinnacle, when in reality not using a DO is more of a challenge and often more appropriate (like when not plop camping). To really think outside the box, backpack 5 miles in without a cooler or dutch oven and still cook great meals. DO cooking is great for base camp, but when on patrol one can still eat very well.

[Eagledad]

Our Dutch Ovens are used mostly for long slow cooking like crock pot meals. Throw in the ingredients in the early afternoon and a few hours later a delicious one pot meal is ready to be served. Honestly these kinds of meals are no brainers and require very little skill. 

 

We are a back packing troop, but I've never seen a dutch oven taken on a backpacking trek. Our guys took a lot of pride in packing light, so it wasn't even considered. I have read of some creative ideas for home made light weight back packing dutch ovens, we just never thought about it.

 

Baarry

[Krampus]

If you think DO cooking is easy, I invite you to try cooking an entree, 2 sides and dessert -- all at the same time -- so they are perfectly cooked and timed to be ready at the same time. If you find that easy, cook using the stacking method and try to get the same results. Last weekend was Chicken Kiev, steamed veggies, sauteed green beans and garlic with a Texas peach and whiskey (cooked out) cobbler. 

 

Edited September 23, 2015 by Krampus

[DuctTape]

Done it. Easy. Dutch ovens do the work and also keep everything warm, so timing is a non issue. I challenge you to do the same with just a scout mess kitcand an open fire, no charcoal.

[Krampus]

Done it. Easy. Dutch ovens do the work and also keep everything warm, so timing is a non issue. I challenge you to do the same with just a scout mess kitcand an open fire, no charcoal.

 

Advanced SERE training. Done!

[Stosh]

My ASM has severe diet restrictions so I'm on my own with my meals.

 

I Dutch oven cook in my aluminum mess kit all the time.  It is a skill I learned back when I was a kid in scouting.  I have done the baking bread, blueberry muffins in the morning, and hobo dinners with onion gravy and mashed potatoes and glazed carrots all using just the mess kit.  Sweet and sour pork over rice is always a good sell for me as well.  Bisquick biscuits done up in the mess kit do well with whatever fruit is on the bushes nearby too. 

 

Otherwise, it's the aluminum DO that gets the work out because I love my blueberry muffins and the mess kit is too small for nice even baking of 2-3 muffins.

 

Mess kit cooking has become rather passe over the years especially since they have gone to the stupid plastic knob on the boiler and the even more ridiculous plastic cup.  Antique stores are about the only place nowadays to find a good mess kit, but they are worth their weight in gold.