How to cook meat with no equipment?

Question

Our ancestors have cooked and eaten meat for thousands of years with only primitive equipment (no pots, pans, etc). In a survival situation or when traveling with minimum equipment it may be useful to use similar methods. However, I have little experience in cooking in this way.

What good methods exist for cooking meat with minimal/no equipment (I'm sure there must be several), how should they be done and what are their pros/cons?

I'd also be interested to know about the historical usage of different methods if known.

Answer 1

You can cook meat on a wooden skewer, piecing it like a kebab, and turning it frequently to prevent burning and to allow it to cook evenly. Similarly you can do this with two sticks and have the meat tied between the two. This is useful for smaller chunks, but becomes difficult with larger ones. You also will have to take care with dripping fat which can spit in the flames.

In the same way meat can be spit roasted, but you would have to prepare a spit out of logs for this which could be too excessive.

You can also cook meats on a heated rock, which is a technique still used in restaurants today for steak cooking. This should be easy enough if you have prepared a fire ring. A flat clean rock is best, and you can take the rock out of the fire to prevent spitting or over cooking.

You can leaf wrap the meat and cook it over coals (I saw this on TV done with a deer, over heated coals and covered by sand / dirt) and leave it for a few hours. - I'm almost certain I saw this on Time Team, but can't remember the era. This is time consuming but works similarly to a bbq, as the coals are no longer on fire.

Answer 2

If you have clay, you can form it into a sheet and wrap the meat with it. You cover the thing with hot coals and wait. When it is ready you break the shell and retrieve the goods inside.

Baking Meat In Clay

Alternatively, if you have flour you can do the same but with dough. The dough will be burned to char, but the food inside will be protected by the dough.

Answer 3

Fire pit is always a good one. Dig a hole. Build a nice fire and put stones in it until they heat up ( don't use stones from a river as they will burst). Drop the stones into the hole, add meat wrapped in leaves or rushes and fill the hole back in with the excavated soil. Leave for an hour or two and you will have beautifully cooked meat. Also works with sand ( Hawaiian style ) or water. To broil your meat make a waterproof hole (line with clay) drop some hot stones in and add your meat then cover the hole with branches covered with soil or sand to keep the heat in. We used to use all three techniques all the time on camping trips with Scouts - the younger ones (Cub Scouts) always thought this was really cool.

Answer 4

Here in Brazil, more specifically in the southern states of the country, we are used to make the weekly Churrasco.

It's basically a way of cooking meat with skewers (made of iron, but you can make it with wooden ones aswell). You pierce the meat with those bad boys and place them on top of a Churrasqueira. Inside the Churrasqueira, you have your ember and from time to time you must rotate the skewers to prevent burning the meat.

You can make an improvised Churrasqueira with either bricks, stones or with a half-cut barrel.

I don't know when the Churrasco was invented, but it's a long-time tradition of latin-american people.

Another funny fact: we have this tradition in the southern part of Brazil called Costelão (translates to big ribs for the lack of a proper word) where we gather with lots of people to eat... well, take a look:

I assure you it tastes better than it looks :)

More informations on Wikipedia: Churrasco.

Answer 5

The most ancient form of simmering is to use a piece of supple tanned leather and some stones. It works with a plastic bag too.

You have to make a fire and heat 3-4 fist-sized stones in it. You also have to form a pouch from your leather somehow, e.g. By binding the corners to a stick and suspending it. A nylon bag doesn't need that, it can be laid in a soft pile of dirt or leaves which support it slightly without spilling. You put water, meat and the hot stones in the soft pot, and after sufficient time, you have a soup (may need to exchange the stones now and then for hotter ones). Interestingly, the heat is not enough to melt the bag, but the meat does get cooked.

It's a fiddly and long process, but it has the charm of feeling very primal, pre-metal-working style. If I were in a survival situation though, I would rather spend the time on getting back to civilization and grill the meat the quickest way I can, over open fire, regardless of culinary merits.

Answer 6

One technique that I remember from my old boy scout book was putting a steak directly on hot coals. Covering fish in clay and burying it in the fire is also a good technique.

If we allow ourselves to use string then we can use a technique called string roasting.

Open Fire Cooking Experiments

One person to study is chef Francis Mallman who cooks everything on an open fire. He mostly uses equipment but he has some techniques he uses that are very basic.

Answer 7

Alternatives to cooking are also a possibility. Pickling, for example. Or fermentation, as practised by the Inuit and other Arctic tribes.

Answer 8

There are a few distinct methods which require few or no tools.

1) Skewers : good for fish and small pieces of meat, especially more tender cuts which don;t require long cooking. simply thread the meat onto a sharpened green stick and support over the fire. Here a fire of hot embers with little or no flame works best. The larger scale version of this is spit roasting.

2) Cauldron : if you need to boil water or make soup or stew but don't have a metal cooking pot there are two techniques. Firstly A shallow bag made from leather or tightly woven canvas can, with care be used to boil water over a fire without burning as the water seeping through the material keeps it cool. The second method is to use any container which will hold water, even a natural hollow in a rock, fill it with water and place into it rocks heated in a fire.

3) Pit roasting/BBQ : this technique is still fairly widely used. You basically dig a pit, line it with rocks, light a fire, let it burn down to embers. Place your wrapped meat in the hole and bury. This can be an efficient way to cook large joints of meat.

4) Wrapping/steaming : wrap the meat well in leaves, seaweed and or/clay and place on hot embers, this will steam the food and works well with fish. Directly wrapping in clay can also peel off feathers, scales or spines and so save on some preparation time (results may vary) .

5) Ovens : if you have a bit more time you could make a simple oven from clay or stones. This is essentially a hollow which you light a fire inside alloy it to burn down and then rake or sweep out the ashes and place your food inside.

6) Hot rocks : you can fry food which only needs quick cooking such simply by laying it on reasonably flat smooth rocks heated in a fire.

7) Direct cooking : some things like shellfish, thick skinned roots and tubers and even some cuts of meat can be cooked by placing directly onto embers.

8) Hot smoking : still widely practiced, involves cooking food in the hot gasses from a low fire

9) Air drying : in some environments food can be cured simply by cutting into thin strips and letting it dry in the wind.

Points to note.

In most circumstances the best way to cook it with a fire which is burned down to a good bed of embers with little or no flame or by indirect heat such as heated rocks. This provides a much more controlled and consistent heat than an open flame. In some cases this may require having separate fires for cooking and heat light, or you can always transfer embers from your main fire to a separate cooking area.

Take care when cooking that the fuel and any plant material used for wrapping, skewering food etc is not poisonous.

Some types of rocks can explode when heated, this is a whole separate subject but in general avoid flints or stones taken from a river bed.