Customer Reviews

The Back-Country Kitchen: Camp Cooking for Canoeists, Hikers, and Anglers

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After a lot of research, I bought this book. From first glance, I knew I had the right book. Recipes run the gamut from simple and tasty Maccaroni and Cheese to more complex Sweet and Sour Chicken. The book contains recipes for breakfast, breads, soups, main & side dishes, fish & game, international, beverages, and desserts & snacks. One chapter covers equipment and camp cooking techniques. At just over 200 pages, it's chocked full of great camp cooking ideas.

Many of the recipes call for dried foods, some of which may be hard to find in smaller towns. However, there is a chapter that explains the basics of home food drying.

This is a great resource for anyone who enjoys camping. Whether you camp in a backwoods primitive camp or a more modern setting, you're certain to find plenty to enjoy from this cookbook!

I read many reviews and purchased a couple of books on camp cooking, and if I were only allowed to have one, this is it.

When looking for books on camp cooking, one must align their type of camping with that addressed by the book. This book is subtitled CAMP COOKING FOR CANOEISTS, HIKERS AND ANGLERS. The rather varying needs of these types of people are well addressed. The canoeist, or someone camping by car, will carry more pots and pans than the hiker, but with over 150 recipes, all can find something. My wife and I currently only camp by car, but hope to start camping by kayak, and this book was right down our alley.

The recipes are good and are rather "normal" foods like you'd have at home. (Some camping books promote some pretty strange things.) The emphasis is on preparation at home, using ingredients that are light, easily packed and travel well. Most of the recipes require a little more preparation time and are more sophisticated than what you'll find in other books. (If you want quickly prepared, but plainer (stranger?), meals for hiking, see BACKCOUNTRY COOKING by Miller.) The opening chapters discuss the selection of camping food ingredients, and includes a substantial description of home drying which rivals the information in books devoted exclusively to the subject such as HOW TO DRY FOODS. You will probably find having a home dehydrator will be beneficial to get the most from this book. The author describes selection of camp cooking equipment such as stoves, cookware and eating utensils, and briefly discusses camping over an open fire, or with some of the camp ovens available, although most of the recipes are for a camping stove. Then there are ten chapters of recipes, such as "Soups," "Breakfast," "Main Dishes," and "Beverages." Each recipe is marked by icons indicating how many pots are needed, if the ingredients are readily available at grocery stores, whether it requires home drying, or if it requires canned foods. Clear black and white photos are interspersed throughout the book, and there are two sections of color photographs.

I found the first part of the book to be very valuable on its own. By knowing how to prepare ingredients for camping, such as clarifying butter, you can adopt your own recipes or dry mix foods for camping. I tried the upside-down sloppy Joes and beef stroganoff, and later, my wife informed me that mixes were available in the grocery store, so rather than collect all of the ingredients called for in the recipe, I adopted the prepared mixes. Unlike some other camp cook books that rely heavily on freeze dried foods sitting in some general store in the wilds of Colorado somewhere (or require mail ordering), most ingredients are available at the average supermarket (although despite seemingly having EVERYTHING by Knorr, my local Publix does not seem to have the mushroom SAUCE [not GRAVY] called for by the beef stroganoff recipe!).

If you only want one book on camp cooking, want to be rewarded with a satisfying meal, and don't mind a little preparation in camp, this is the book to have. It will take many years of camping to try all of the recipes in this book that interest us.

I was looking for a book to start out a libriary for back-country cooking. I stumbled upon this one. I even use these recipes at home and they are very good, so you can amagine how good they taste on the trial. Simple and easy to prepare from start to finish.

This book contains recipes for camp meals that are tastier, larger portioned, and much, MUCH cheaper than the packaged alternatives available at camping stores.

Using a dehydrator and cleverly utilized items from the grocery store (e.g. the sour cream powder from a box of dried potatoes as an ingredient in a very good beef stroganoff) you can assemble a delicious menu for your next outing.

The book is geared towards wilderness camping, with an emphasis on light and dehydrated ingredients, all of which can be economically made in a dehydrator, or bought at a regular grocery store.

The recipes are very nicely classified by complexity of preparation, and length of cook time. The author's loves for cooking and wilderness camping combine wonderfully in this excellent book.

I started wilderness camping a few years ago and I have used this book for wonderfully tasty meals. When weight and space are an important consideration (portaging can be ugly) this book makes me look like a pro. Dehydrated store-bought food can be expensive and disappointing in taste and portions. This book has a simple approach to everything. I like the ease of preparation rating system, suggestions for packing the recipe as well as preparation in camp. Pictures make it easy even for a novice. I usually make a copy of the recipe and put it in the baggie with all the ingredients for the recipe. I like this book well enough to give it as a gift to our friends.

I am in charge of packing the food for my sister and I each Spring and Fall for ten days in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I started drying our own food after the first trip (up to 15 now) and this is my go-to book. All of my basic recipes are based on Marrone's original recipes, but, of course, have morphed over time. But I still consult the front section about drying details such as yield from dried veggies. Try the recipes at home first and tweak as needed; Weetamo is not for everyone.

If you are thinking about drying your own foods and making up your own back-country meals, this book is the place to start.

This is a superb compact cookbook for those who enjoy the outdoors and like eating home cooked eat'en while enoying the great outdoors! Well organized with easy read rating icons, this book lets you know at a glance what and how much preparation is needed to cook and serve each dish, the best and alternate cooking techniques, required grocery store ingredients, or baked at home recommended instructions. I enjoyed this book because we camp alot and I'm always looking for ways to cut down on our baggage, clutter, and weight. This book was worth it's weight in gold! It benchmarks most of it's recipes on dried foods or powder substitutes. It suggests premeasuring and placing in marked baggies ingredients to meal preparation. Weight cutting measures, such as, using powdered milk, powdered eggs, and dried ingredients can dramatically size down the amount of uncut or bulk items! This cookbook would be best matched with someone who owned and master a dehydrater, altough, it isn't necessary for most of the recipes. One can pick and choose the ingredients to dry and supplement based on their space or carrying capacity and purchase those ingredients at a grocery store near your camping location. The recipes included are basics and should give you enough to work with to possibly create your own renditions! Included are rehydrating techniques to use at camp for those lightweight dried ingredients to bring them back to life at the campsite. This book is compact, it does have a few pictures, some color, but small sized to accommodate the hand size of this must have trail and camping cookbook.Don't miss these selected picks I've found to be worth the purchase, Campfire Biscuits, Upside-Down Sloppy Joes, Grits With Egg And Cheese!

RECOMMENDED!

Enjoying this book and another similar one. I'm always looking for new approaches to good food on the road not just on the trail. We want to travel lighter and yet some of us enjoy good food too not to mention more healthy foods. I hate the pre-made everything or fancy soup mixes because they are loaded with salt. I'm sensitive to salts due to edema and meniers problems so this does matter. Making your own from scratch and thinking outside the box and boxes literally here really is worth making this a hobby of sorts. We do...and this is just a good starter book if not an addition worth having in your arsenal of books for ideas and creative tools to get you going in the right direction. Covers a lot of foods not just limited to one type or style. Breaks down in easy to understand format. I'm enjoying it as a quick read for now. May return to it in more detail to try out specific recipes and slight variations on a few later. For now it's just reading material due to a cold late start to summer fun up here. NO river floating for now as it's still in run off and lots of snow in the high country is going to keep it there. Hiking is also on hold as the high country....snow chutes and some roads are still closed not to mention hike paths themselves as you get higher...I do recommend this book for those who do enjoy packaging their own foods together. There are tons of sources these days for freeze dried peas and vegi's and fruits that didn't use to exist. So these types of books are wonderful and helpful. I never follow a recipe to the T...always changing it up or using it as an idea platform. In this case....keeping it light or lighter even works better.

I've had this book, in paperback, for a number of years. It's simply the gold standard when it comes to packing lightweight yet really interesting foods for the trail... nothing else even comes close. A friend of mine showed me her Kindle with this book on it, and I have to say, this is a first-rate conversion for the Kindle. I've seen books on Kindle that were simply the original text put on the Kindle reader, with no thought to navigating or how the book actually works on the Kindle (and some even refer to page so-and-so, which clearly does not work for a Kindle!).

The Back-Country Kitchen Kindle edition really was done right. It is thoroughly cross-referenced with links throughout the book, so when you are looking at, say, a suggested menu, the list has links to all the recipes, making it easy to just click to check out the recipe. If a special technique (such as the drugstore wrap for foil cooking) is referred to in a recipe, there is a link to an explanation of the technique--and many of these even include photos, something which seems rare on a Kindle. Even the icons from the paperback book, which explain if the recipe is easy or more complicated to cook in camp, whether the recipe uses store-bought or home-dried foods etc, are included in the Kindle edition, making this book a real treat to use on the Kindle.

In summary, if you enjoy camping and want to improve the food you eat--especially if you want lightweight foods and don't want to get ripped off by buying those crummy freeze-dried "meals"--you need to buy this book. If you have a Kindle, I am sure you will be as impressed with it as I was, but even if you don't, the paperback is also excellent.

What a find this book is! I like to go camping but the prospect of figuring out what to eat always stops me cold. And I hate pre-fab food! The author covers every aspect of cooking for camping -- the planning, preparing, purchasing tips, shortcuts, techniques and storage. It is written in an easy to follow narrative style. Like your knowledgeable and interesting friend is sharing her wisdom from much experience and research. The pictures are clear and the symbols are a great help for navigating. The diversity of recipes is inspiring. Even though this book has been printed traditionally I can tell it has been formatted and updated for the Kindle. There is a lot of attention to details like style and links for searching.