Your Ultimate Summer Cookout Solution

Campsite cookout or backyard bacchanal, it’s time to think like a chef. The secret? Plan, prep, and, yes, bag your food in advance. The payoff? A super-fast outdoor feast.

Written by Ellen Fort and Hugh Garvey August 16, 2020

We asked 30 of the West’s best chefs to tell us how to eat well in the wild. We didn’t want to hear their Outstanding in the Field fantasy of hand-caught trout and foraged berry clafoutis served on tables lined with beeswax candelabras. We wanted to know how they really cooked, without a battalion of prep cooks to back them up, equipped with just a cooler, a pot, and open flame. We’re happy to report that not one chef offered up ideas for artisanal s’mores or gourmet hot dogs. Their advice was refreshingly, resoundlingy, emphatically the same: prep, cook, and, yes, bag what you can in advance. 

So we did exactly that and toted frozen bags of soups, braises, grillable par-cooked marinated vegetables, and prime meats into the wilds of the Santa Susana Mountains north of Los Angeles. You’ll see actual results of our trip here. Everything was cooked either on a two-burner propane stove or on olive wood from fallen trees in a fire pit. No food stylists. No mobile kitchen just out of frame. Just coolers, bags, and a commitment to eating the best possible food with minimal effort in the open air. 

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Grilled Berkshire Pork Chops with Thai Black Mustard Glaze

We all know food cooked over an open fire in the wild tastes amazing, even humble burgers and brats. You know what tastes even better? An exceptional cut of heirloom pork, like this Berkshire bone-in loin chop. The marbling on this cut is exceptional, but the complex, deeply flavored glaze from Juan Rendon, chef de cuisine at Gwen in Los Angeles, would make even a humble supermarket chop sing. Squid ink is the key ingredient that gives this mustard its deep black color. Squid ink is available online, though the recipe is delicious with or without it.

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Charred Spicy Broccolini

Partially cook this spicy cruciferous side dish in the kitchen before finishing it on the grill for smoke and char.

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Packable Pozole Rojo

Brett Cooper, Culinary Director of Sightglass in Los Angeles, loves camping in Big Sur with his family. To make his outings hassle-free he cryovacs and freezes much of his food in advance, including this hearty, smoky pozole rojo. If you want to skip the added time and effort of cooking dried hominy, feel free to use canned.

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Base Camp Birria

When we asked Wes Avila of Guerilla Tacos to host a camp cooking workshop last year, his advice was “don’t cook” and then he taught us a killer 5-minute recipe for salmon ceviche (smoked soy sauce was the secret ingredient). For this feature he shared a slightly more involved but still easy slow-simmered take on ubiquitous birria, albeit made with lamb rather than the traditional goat or recently trending beef.

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Granola Berry-Barb Crisp

This easy-peasy fruit dessert from Valerie Gordon of Valerie Confections in Los Angeles comes together in minutes. Use your favorite granola for the topping alongside the berries of your choice. Bonus: It’s also incredible for breakfast.

This story originally appeared in our summer 2020 Outdoor Living issue.

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