Making a Campfire Pizza Oven

Want to impress your friends with a neat backcountry cooking technique? Make a pizza! My gripe with trying to cook a pita pizza over a campfire had always been that while the bottom gets toasty the top of the pizza only gets warm. Then on one cold, fateful night in the wild, we invented the campfire broiling technique.

Pita pizzas are a great backpacking food because the ingredients are relatively lightweight and they’re a good alternative to the monotonous pastas and other mushy foods that make up a hot meal in the outdoors. We just use pitas (which pack well), mozzarella cheese (which is nutrient dense and lasts at least a few days), pepperoni, herbs, and pizza sauce. The sauce is by far the least weight-efficient food but you could probably find a dehydrated alternative.

The gist of the technique is to bend a sheet of aluminum foil into a half-cylinder shape that is open at both ends. Since foil is a reflective insulator it will literally direct the flames and heat back down to the top of the pizza. The foil also helps to create a convection current. All you need is a campfire and a cooking platform such as a grate or flat rock. Aluminum foil is ridiculously lightweight — I always keep a few folded up sheets in my bag (see: Backpacking Tips).

First we slow-cooked the pizzas on the foil-covered grate until the bottoms started to get toasty. Then we threw the foil broiler on top so that half of it was over the flames and the other half over the pizza. Although the pictures do not do it justice, it was crazy to see the flames bending up from the fire and back down onto the tops of the pizzas. It only took about thirty seconds for the cheese to sizzle and the pizzas to achieve a nice oven-baked look.

An alternative to this technique that I’ve used for sandwiches is to just wrap the food in foil and throw it next to the fire or on some coals. That can lead to other problems like the food sticking to the foil or not being able to tell if the food is burning. This might just win for the quaintness factor, but who could turn down a hot pizza out there? I will definitely be experimenting with this technique in the future — maybe even try to cook pizzas with dough. Next up, a rustic creme brulee?