Camping with cheese is a tricky proposition; some cheeses fare better than others in the wild. Hikers must walk a fine line to select an appropriate cheese that will keep without refrigeration and are mild enough to be used in multiple dishes. After a long day of hiking, you’ll want a warm meal. So how do you cook with cheese over an open fire, using minimal equipment?
Yahoo Food featured an excerpt from Paula Marcoux’s new book, Cooking with Fire, detailing the simplest of dishes: toasted cheese. Find some green sticks, plop a cube of cheese on the end (similar to roasting marshmallows), and add the melting blob to toast. However, Marcoux has a few tips of her own when it comes to selection.
In terms of successful toasting, the texture of the cheese is actually more important than the flavor, so that latter part’s up to you. Any cheese that is moist enough to be impaled without cracking, and that has a melting quality, should work. These characteristics do happen to describe most of the greater cheddar family of cheeses, but there are many other cheeses from other lands (Havarti, fontina, young Gouda) that are also splendid in this application.
Want more resources? Here’s a guide to help you choose your camping cheese (and don’t forget to pack a handy pocket knife). Or, if you’re just headed out for a day-long jaunt in the woods, pack the hiker-friendly cheeseplate featured in our summer issue.
Alicia Hahn
Alicia Hahn excels at eating and enjoys writing, crosswords, and cooking (preferably with cheese). Originally from San Francisco, she moved to Boston for school and fell in love with the city (despite an annual campaign against winter). Her favorite place to be is the farmers’ market, where she finds weird and exciting ingredients to make or break her next meal.
