Summer Isn’t Over Until You’ve Cooked Over an Open Fire. 3 Recipes to Try

LATE LAST summer I placed cement blocks in a circle in the field of my family’s vegetable farm and lit a campfire. It was the last fire of the season and, as the farm crew came down the hill from the hot day, I started cooking dinner for them. 

I set up a welded iron rig that I’ve developed and tweaked over the years and use for live fire cooking. As the crew gathered around the fire, they cracked open beers and seltzers. I buried eggplants and potatoes in the coals, hung a whole leg of venison and some cabbages above the flames, and cooked flatbreads on a griddle set over more coals. After an hour or so we ate a fire-roasted feast before we piled broken pallets and wooden tomato trellises on top of the fire to build it up to bonfire size. And so we toasted the end of another successful farm season.

That setup made for a great party, but often I’ll simply start a campfire in a grill. A backyard fire pit is another obvious choice. Pulling off a whole meal over a fire is one of the most satisfying ways to cook. It’s also one of the oldest, and one of the most difficult. Typically, you’ve got several foods, each requiring a different heat level and cooking time, going at once. But there’s a magic to the experience, a full-on engaging of the senses as the heat of the flames and flavor of the smoke suffuse the food.

Large hunks of meat might come to mind when contemplating cooking with live fire—and I can attest that the aforementioned leg of venison was a showstopper—but vegetables are the unsung heroes of this technique. Eggplants, onions, potatoes, leeks or beets, buried in a pile of coals, emerge truly transformed, silky and smoky. Peppers can be blackened and their skins slipped off to make relishes, soups and sauces. Charred scallions can stand as a complete dish all by themselves. 

Francis Mallmann’s cookbook “Green Fire” applies a welcome dash of whimsy to fire-cooked veggies, while Steven Raichlen’s “How to Grill Vegetables” offers more straightforward advice on fire and rig building. Both books contain excellent recipes.

After building the fire, I give it an hour to burn before cooking, to build up a substantial bed of coals. Then I flatten the fire out, creating different cooking zones. Coals in one place, live fire in another place and some space in between for indirect cooking. A circle of cement blocks can provide the base for suspended grating just as the lip of a kettle grill or fire pit can.

Any hardwood will do, but if you can get your hands on fruitwood you’ll notice a sweetness in the smoke. Oak has a sour flavor. Hickory and cedar bring nutty and piney tastes. They’re all delicious. Even hardwood charcoal will bring a lovely smokiness.

When I’m cooking for my family at home, in a grill, I build a fire and let it burn down before adding foil packets of potatoes, garlic and olive oil to the coals. I use long metal tongs to nestle the packets in the fire and place coals on and around them. Then I set the grill grates on top. Peppers, which only improve with a little char, will cook over direct heat, while pork tenderloin, which wants a more even cook, needs to move back and forth from direct to indirect heat, turned almost constantly for a roast uniformly browned on the outside, pink in the middle.

A cast-iron skillet set right in the fire provides a searingly hot cooking surface. And many brands of fire pit, such as Breeo and Solo Stove, offer a battery of attachments, from griddles to woks, to expand your live-fire repertoire.

But bear in mind, all sorts of tools not typically associated with grilling will serve you, too. Small-mesh cattle fencing works as a grill grate when propped up on cinder blocks; for smaller items that could fall through the fencing, just borrow your grill rack and place it on top. Skewered with spatchcocked chickens, a pitchfork makes a great impromptu rotisserie. Rebar can become a skewer for whole vegetables like zucchini or smaller cuts of meat like chicken thighs, with one end of the bar inserted into the ground at an angle, allowing you to adjust the proximity of food to flame. A square of steel sheet metal makes a serviceable griddle. Leather work gloves let you pick up burning logs and shuffle coals around.

In other words, fancy gear is not the point. Go ahead, get creative. A fire-cooked meal should be at least as much fun to cook as it is to eat.