In this episode of the Primitive Camping and Bushcraft Podcast, Chris Speir shares an intense personal experience involving a grease fire while cooking outdoors, highlighting the importance of fire safety. He then transitions into a deep dive on outdoor cooking methods, discussing essential gear, cooking techniques, and how to prepare delicious meals while camping with minimal equipment.
New YouTube Channel Announcement
Weekend Fire Incident: Lessons in Outdoor Cooking Safety
Introduction to Outdoor Cooking
Different Cooking Methods in the Wild
Essential Cooking Gear for Camping
Cooking with Cast Iron vs. Stainless Steel
Looking Ahead: Future Cooking Topics
Final Thoughts & Wrap-Up
(upbeat music)
Welcome back to the Primitive Camping
and Bushcraft Podcast.
My name's Chris Speir,
and I'm gonna be your guide
to enjoying the great outdoors.
So there's a couple of things that I
wanted to discuss today.
I had to move all the
YouTube videos of this podcast
to its own platform.
So we has got its own YouTube channel now
called the Primitive Camper,
and it's no longer gonna be
on the Spear Outdoors page.
So I kind of separated the two.
And there's a reason why it
all has to do with analytics
and numbers and views and view counts
and all that stuff that
happens in the background
that a lot of people
don't really understand
when it comes to YouTubes and
videos and social media stuff.
And a lot of that drives how you perform,
what kind of videos
you make and the such.
So what I'm doing is
I'm separating the two.
The videos will be found
in the Primitive Camping
and Bushcraft group on Facebook,
and it'll be found on the YouTube page,
the Primitive Camper.
And I'll leave links, I'll change the
links into the podcast
if you're listening to the podcast on a
podcasting platform.
Now, I wanna start today
off by, I've had a weekend.
I have really had a weekend.
I don't know how y'all
have, I've just had a time.
So I found a new way.
The filet mignon went on sale,
and you get a large size
filet for like 50 bucks,
45 or 50 bucks, and so I bought one.
And I cut it up real
thick, about an inch and a half,
two inches, and I
brought it to the house,
and I was gonna cook
it following a recipe
that we saw on TikTok
or Face Tube or whatever.
And this recipe is pretty cool.
You put a little bit of
grease, about quarter inch
through our half an inch of
grease or oil in a skillet.
And so I decided I was gonna do that.
And this is very timely
because we're talking
about cooking today,
and I'm giving you my cooking
experience over the weekend.
So I decided I was
gonna cook these steaks,
and I turned the grease on outside,
and I got an outdoor kitchen
on the back porch type deal,
and I had a single burner like a fryer
or like a stove, propane stove outside.
And I had a 14 inch cast iron skillet,
and it had about maybe quarter inch,
half inch of grease or oil in it.
And I turned it on to heat the grease up,
and I turned around, went back inside.
And when I did that, I was salting and
peppering the steak.
I was just putting rock
salt and pepper on it,
and our Himalayan salt and pepper on it.
And my wife called, and
so I answered the phone,
and I was talking in the cold about it.
And what we're doing, blah, blah, blah,
and I had some shrimp in the sink,
and I was like, well,
I'll peel these shrimp,
and I'll go cook those on some garlic.
And so I'm sitting there,
Nicole and I are talking
for a long time, and I just hang up.
She was on the way home
from work and everything,
and I was like, all right, that's great.
I'll have dinner done for
you whenever you get here.
And I turned around and looked,
and the whole outside of
my porch was glowing orange,
like fire, glowing orange.
And I freaked out.
I was like, oh my gosh.
So I ran out there, and
the flames was all the way up
to the vinyl side and on the back porch,
and I was like, oh my gosh,
it's fixing to catch fire.
It's gonna catch fire, and I add it,
and it's just gonna
spread to the whole house.
So without doing anything,
I mean, it was just flames.
It was eight feet of flames.
And I'm sitting there thinking like,
oh, Lord, what do I do so quickly?
Instead of reaching down and
turning the propane bottle off
and then putting a lid
on top of the skillet
and just
extinguishing the flame that way,
I grabbed the whole thing
and threw it out into the yard.
That way it couldn't
catch the house on fire,
and it had been raining a little bit,
so the grass wasn't
gonna burn and all that.
Well, whenever I did
that, everything flipped,
and the grease fire immediately went out,
but the propane bottle
landed on top of the burner,
and the burner was just on fire.
Boy, let me tell you,
you talk about freak out.
I was like, oh my God,
we're fixing to have
a remodeled back porch
because this thing's gonna blow up.
I'm like, oh man.
So I run to the side of the
house to grab the water hose,
and I disconnected
that hose and hooked up
a automatic water, dog
water feeding bowl, you know?
So whenever it goes low, it
automatically fills back up.
So I was like, ah, that's right.
Hose is on the other side of the house.
So I run on the other side of the house,
didn't have any lights on
outside, and it was dark.
I couldn't see squat, and
I'm already almost blind,
and my phone was in
the house in the kitchen
where I was just talking to Nicole,
and I was just like,
man, this is horrible.
This is horrible.
So I felt defeated.
At that point, I was
like, Lord, what do I do?
And that propane tank's fixing to blow up
at any time.
So what I did is I was just
wallbiting into the kitchen,
I grabbed my phone,
walked out the front door,
and I called 911, and I said, hey.
There was a fire, and I kind of
extinguished the fire,
but the propane bottle is still going,
and I didn't wanna get
near the propane bottle
because I've seen instances where people,
propane bottles have
blown up and stuff like that,
and it's a huge bomb.
And so I waited on the
fire department to show up,
and whenever they got
there, they said, hey,
you got a water hose?
And I was like, you would outside.
(laughing)
So I went around the
house, and I got the water hose,
I hooked it up, and they sat there.
Now, mind you, by the
time they got there,
it's been 15 minutes
that this propane bottle
was on the burner, and
the burner had active flames
just to cook in that bottle.
I mean, it's a wonder it did not explode.
I could not believe it.
Well, they just took that water hose,
and they put the water
hose on the bottle itself
to cool the bottle down, and then,
finally, the flames
went out, and I was like,
check this out, this is crazy.
And so they just sat
there, and they cooled
the water bottle down, or
the propane bottle down,
and then, I couldn't
understand why it didn't blow up.
And then, so once
they got everything out,
disconnected everything, because the
bottle had heated up,
it had started to leak
gas around the seals,
and I was like, this does not make sense.
I do not understand why
this bottle did not explode.
And, I mean, it was a
propane bomb is what it was.
It melted out the, there
was a piece of plastic valve
in there, it melted out.
It melted the hose
where it was coming out.
It melted everything on the sand,
where the regulator
goes, and I'm just like,
there's no possible way
this thing didn't explode.
God had his hands on the situation.
So, I just, that was my experience in
cooking this weekend.
(laughs)
But anyway, today's
episode is all about cooking,
and we're 10 minutes into it,
and that was my story for this weekend.
So, you know, cooking
is, and has always been
one of my favorite
things to do in the woods.
I love cooking.
Anytime me and friends go camping,
or me and my brothers go, or whatever,
I'm always cooking, and
that's because cooking is just,
so relaxing to me, I love cooking.
Cooking's a great way
to hone your skills,
and it brings joy to the end of your day.
It really does, it's a way to unwind,
and after all your hard
labor of doing whatever it is
that you're doing, it's an
easy way to relax and enjoy
the fruits of your labor.
So, I love doing the cooking thing.
So, you know, if you're
following along in the book,
we're on page 216, the
hardest part of cooking outdoors,
whether you're frying or roasting,
is ensuring that your food is
cooked to a safe temperature.
You know, a lot of
people, whenever they're cooking
outdoors, they don't have the access to
the meat thermometers
and, you know, stuff like that.
So, a lot of people overcook their food
when they're outside,
you know, to be safe.
Now, when you get into beef
steaks and stuff like that,
you don't have to be
as strenuous as you do,
let's say a bird, any
kind of foul poultry
or anything like that.
And because, you know, once
you start getting into birds,
you have to, you can
get salmonella real quick,
like man, hurry, you know.
Most campers will not
have a food thermometer,
and, you know, they
leave it up to guesswork.
And that's so true because
you gotta cook your temperature,
your food to
temperature in order to ensure
that you're not gonna get sick.
So, I listed a bunch of cooking
temperatures in the book.
If you want to be extra cautious,
a food thermometer is
not that heavy, you know,
and I'm not gonna bring
one, I'd be honest with you.
I'm really not gonna do it.
But, you know, beef
pork veal, lamb chops,
and stuff like that, you cook to 145.
Ground meats, you wanna cook to 160.
Ground poultry is 165.
Ham's fresh or smoked, you
wanna cook them up to 145.
And all these are Fahrenheit.
You know, fully cooked ham,
you wanna come all the way up to 165.
All poultry, that's the
breast, the whole bird,
the legs, thighs, wings, ground poultry,
the giblets, giblets,
whatever you wanna call it,
and stuffing is 165.
Eggs, you wanna cook those to 160.
Fish and shellfish, 145.
Frogs and snakes, 145.
Now, we've talked about this before,
and we've gone over it,
and there's a lot of
different ways to cook.
And so what I wanna do
is I wanna slow my roll,
and I wanna really talk
about what's in this book
for a while.
You know, and we're not,
this ain't gonna be the
longest episode in the world,
but you know, you can set
out two logs or some rocks,
and you can use that to
set your frying pans or a,
a grill or some sort or
something like that on,
and that will keep it,
you know, scraped coals
and everything underneath there.
You don't really
wanna cook on open flames.
You wanna cook on the coals.
The coals is where the heat is,
is how you help control what
temperature you're cooking at.
You know, so when you're using the logs,
you know, you put one
on each side of the fire
and put your whatever on top,
and like your skillet,
your skillet, your pot,
your bush pot, your, you
know, your Dutch oven, whatever.
And that's going to be raised up
to where you can do whatever with the
coals underneath it.
You can scrape as many
coals under there as you want.
But, you know, a lot of
people use open coals, man,
and I watch this a lot.
Like, you ever watch the
Outdoor Boys, you know,
what's his name, Luke?
I think it is.
I watched him throw some stuff right on
open coals the other
day, you know, a lot of people take a,
some kind of like a steak.
They'll take steaks and
they'll take the steak
and they'll just flip that
dude out there on the coals.
And I've never been one to do that
because I don't like
chewing grit, you know,
but it don't matter.
And, you know, you got to understand
this ain't a survival situation.
This is primitive camping.
When I go into the woods, I'm camping.
I'm not just surviving, I'm camping.
I'm enjoying myself.
I'm not going to eat
grit if I ain't got to.
But a lot of people do, and a lot of
people do it for show.
And a lot of people like that.
And a lot of people watch it.
You know, that's their release.
And they get the chance to really
just let go of life by
watching somebody else
go through survival
type situations in woods.
There's some people out
there, pretty good at it.
And there's some people
out there and it's like,
wow, how in the heck does
people watch this content,
you know, but it happens.
So people cook stuff on
open coals all the time.
And open coals is not a bad idea.
It can be done.
You can char the outside of your food,
but the inside of it,
essentially you're searing it
where all the juices is in the inside.
Open coals, you use
that for baked potatoes.
Open coals, you can do that.
You can use a stick or
something to make a potcrane
or to make some kind of
something to hold your bird up
or your food up above
the coals to get cooked.
So now, as we discussed in
the water and gear sections,
one of the most
important or essential items
you can carry with you in the woods
is gonna be a metal container.
And I've harped on
that since the beginning,
since I've started all this, you know,
I always have a metal container with you
when you go into the woods.
Now, I wanna show you something.
If you're watching the video right now,
I've stumbled across these.
These are aluminum cups.
They look just like your solo cups,
but they're made out of aluminum.
And I was doing some stuff
with the boys at a mentor
and I was looking for a cup
because we were building survival kits.
And ultimately I
chose not to go with these
because they are a
little bit lighter weight.
But I'll be honest with you,
I think that this cup right
here has a use in the woods.
One, it's a metal container.
Two, I mean, it's a lightweight.
It's not, it's lighter than stainless
steel or aluminum pot,
but it's heavier than
a Coke can, beer can,
stuff like that.
It's way heavier.
And, you know, I want
to do a video on how well
you can boil water in
these aluminum cups.
And the reason why I wanted to do that
is I wanna test the durability of them.
So you get 10 of them
for like five bucks,
something like that. And these things last great.
And you throw them right back.
It says not for dishwasher,
but I throw mine in a
dishwasher all the time.
I don't know why it says no dishwasher.
Maybe I'm killing myself in
the long run by doing that.
I don't know who knows.
But as we discussed earlier,
there's all kinds of stuff.
As long as you choose the
best type of metal for you
and your needs, don't
worry about what they are.
All these people on these U2s
and all these other
platforms say, you know,
go with what you want.
Go with what you want or
what will work for you.
And, you know, packing pots
and pans for your camping trip,
usually will pay dividends
for, you know, your camp,
but, or your kitchen.
But here's one of the downsides to
packing all this camping
gear is that it's heavy.
So if you're hiking into
where you're going, it's heavy.
If you're boating in, or
if you have some sort of ATV
or OTV or something
like that, that, you know,
a conveyance of some
sort, even a horse, you know,
then it's not that bad.
You still want to, like a horse,
you still want to watch
what you weigh, you know,
how much you weigh in,
bring it in with you.
But so that gets to titanium.
You know, we've discussed
this over and over and over
in this book that titanium pots are
incredibly lightweight
and they come in various sizes.
Titanium is usually
used for smaller cookware
such as cups and lightweight pots
and is ideal for boiling water
and reconstitute and
freeze-drive foods, you know.
Cooking in titanium can
quickly burn your food
because the metal gets
hotter in certain spots
and these are called hot spots.
And so, you know,
titanium tends to get hot,
real hot, hot, hot.
Then you got aluminum.
So, you know, from cups
to 24 quart pots or bigger,
aluminum is a lightweight option
that has been a real
big go-to for camping.
You know, I got so many
options when it comes to aluminum
and it's just crazy because, you know,
a lot of people will be like,
oh no, don't use the
aluminum because it's the assabis,
you know, but you know,
people's been cooking
in aluminum for years
and who knows if
that's what's causing it,
what it's not causing
it, they really don't know.
They can't give you a
definitive answer about it,
but you know, so
there's no telling, you know,
just keep, keep strolling.
But you know, aluminum is something
that a lot of people use.
I use, I've used
aluminum for a long time.
I have a hard
anodized aluminum Dutch oven
that is right down here somewhere.
And I'm telling you,
man, I have used that thing
so many, so many times that it's, it's,
I can't even count how many times.
Beyond that, you got stainless steel.
Stainless steel is a,
to me, is the best choice
whenever you're doing durability and
weight to durability.
Yeah, I guess that's
the word I should use.
So weight and durability wise,
that is stainless steel
is going to be the best way
because stainless is
going to last you the longest
and it's also, it's also reliable.
Well, I got some ingestion or something.
And you got cast iron and
cast iron is going to be a,
cast iron is the absolute
best way to go if you can do it.
Now, cast iron also, a two quart pot
weighs seven pounds.
It keeps multiplying from there.
So if you got two quarts,
a gallon pot is 14 pounds,
so just keep adding it up.
Then from the cast
iron, you got enamelware
and that's porcelain coated.
Enamelware is porcelain
coated steel or metal, you know.
And enamelware pots have many advantages,
but they don't have as many hotspots
as titanium and aluminum.
And they are more stick
free than stainless steel
and they're lighter than cast iron.
But enamelware does have a fall
when it's used with camp settings,
such as open fires, they tend to crack.
And they can crack due
to extreme temperatures
of the campfire and your
food becomes contaminated
with the cracks in there.
So you don't want to use the enamelware.
Now you've seen the enamelware plates
and a lot of people, like
if you go to Academy Sports,
you go to Academy and you go back there,
the plates they have for
camping are enamel plates.
Sports
or Cabela's, they have enamel plates.
So there's all kinds
of options out there,
but enamelware is not the most viable.
What I really like to do is go back to
the stainless steel.
Stainless steel is very
prevalent in the camping world.
There are seven, not seven,
several name brand 10 inch skillets.
And these skillets
have been used forever.
And I've used mine, a little 10 inch,
a little folding skillet,
it's a Pathfinder skillet I believe.
Stainless steel is much heavier than
titanium or aluminum,
but it's durable and dependable,
making it perfect for use in the woods.
And I guess what I'm
trying to say is that,
stainless steel is a little heavier,
but it is the most reliable.
It's the best one that I found to use.
If I have a boat or an ATV of some sort,
and I'm going camping via conveyance,
I will have a cast iron.
I love cast iron or not even the,
the cast iron, but then they have the,
what's that other
option from the cast iron?
Oh well, it's like cast
iron is pressed though.
And it's,
oh Lord, what's the name of it?
I can't think of it now.
Yeah, we got a picture of
it right here on page 220,
but it complete with the dirty spot.
You know, but anyway,
these skillets are amazing at cooking,
but they're heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy.
And they take up a lot or a lot of room.
So, but you know, these items,
pots and pans and stuff like that,
logs and rocks and let's say open coals
and all that stuff is an
option that you can use
when you get out into the woods.
There's no, there's no
right, there's no wrong.
There's no right way,
there's no wrong way.
It's just an end result.
What is, do you need to get the end
result that you want?
That's it.
That's the ultimate
goal to doing all this.
How are you going to cook your mushroom
if you need to cook your mushroom?
Simple, simple, simple, simple.
So, but anyway, the,
I told you guys that today
was gonna be a real quick one.
And then next time
we'll get into camp stoves
and stuff like that,
start talking about
different ways to cook your foods
and getting your food all
cooked and how to do it.
So, I thank you for joining me.
Hey, if you don't mind, swing by,
pick up a copy of the
Primitive Camp in the Bushcraft book
on Amazon.
It's $14.40.
It's been there for a long time.
It's the cover price is $19.99.
So, if you got, you swing
by and pick you up a copy,
you can also use the link
here and pick you up a bag
or some pods of the
Primitive Camp in the Bushcraft link
coffee.
I mean, that stuff is very good.
I've got a lot of folks that
are starting to really give
feedback on this stuff.
And yeah, we got an event
next week where we're gonna be
dishing some of this stuff out to people.
It's gonna be good times, man.
It's gonna be good times.
So, I got other things
in the works, but hey,
I thank you so much for your time.
I thank you so much for
taking time out of your busy day
to listen to me blab on about, you know,
Primitive Camp in the Bushcraft.
So, thank you.
I'll see you in the next
video or the next video.
Boy, I jumbled that one all up.
Let me start over.
Thank you so much for
taking time out of your busy day.
I'll see you in the next
video or the next podcast.
God bless you.
Yeah, that was a lot.
Yeah, that was a lot.
(upbeat music)