Survival Cooking May Include Rock Boiling, Spit Roasting and Pit Cooking

Without the basics of a modern kitchen, survival cooking will be an important skill to learn so that you can create hot and nutritional meals just about anywhere. Not only will you need to learn how to create stoves out of natural objects, but you will also need to think about how to get the maximum number of calories out a minimum number of ingredients.

How to Cook

Photo courtesy of halseike

If you have time to prepare, then you should get hold of a large camping stove with enough fuel for a number of weeks. However, surviving is all about being resourceful, so as long as you have means of setting a fire, you can use some old-time skills for survival cooking techniques:

Rock boiling - Rock boiling is one of the oldest cooking techniques in the world dating back to pre-historic times. You start by placing small round stones in the middle of your fire for a couple of minutes until they are nice and hot. In the meantime prepare your food in a container of water. When the rocks are hot, drop them into the container and they will automatically boil the water. Swap the stones over as they start to cool. This works well if your containers can't be placed directly over the fire.

Pit cooking - Again, this is another ancient survival cooking technique. This one uses the natural insulation of the ground to slow cook your food. Start by digging a large pit and lining with large flat stones. Build a fire over the top and allow it to burn hot for a few hours. Cover the stones with a few inches of non-poisonous greenery such as grass and then add the meat. Add another layer of greenery and fill the rest of the hole with dirt. Your meat will be cooked and tender after a few hours. The best thing about pit cooking is that you can go away and leave it without worrying about predators.

Spit roasting - A simple way of cooking meat over an open fire without using any containers. However, you will need wood working tools to construct the spit. Start by finding branches from a young tree around half an inch in diameter. Fashion two spokes that will sit in the ground and support the spit stick about a foot above the fire. Your spit stick needs to be sharp enough at one end to pierce the flesh and thick enough to support the weight of the meat. You can also use spit roasting to cook vegetables as you would a kebab on a skewer.

What to Cook When Survival Cooking

While survival cooking techniques will allow you to feed yourself healthily, what you can actually cook is limited. Start practicing making the following food types so you can get the most out of your ingredients:

• Soups - Rock boiling lends itself naturally to soups so you should start foraging for roots and vegetables that grow nearby. If gardening is an option, potatoes and carrots offer high levels of fiber and starch, while if you are out in the wild, try to find leafy plants like fennel and wild garlic.


• Stews - Cooking meat in a pit will soften it up enough to add into a thick stew. Once you've started the meat cooking, you can then gather together some vegetables to mix together with water. The liquid from the vegetables will flavor the water, and you can then add the meat and its juices to thicken the stew.


• Roast meat - The only difficulty with soups and stews is that you need containers to cook and eat from. Roasting food on a spit means you can eat with your fingers. Learn to find naturally occurring herbs to flavor your meat and make sure that you experiment with different local vegetables to see what tastes good over a fire.

Other methods of cooking in a survival situation include:

• Solar Oven
• Rocket Stove
• Soda Can Stove
• Candle cooking
• Fry Rock
• Rock Oven
• Fireplace
• Campstove
• Woodstove

Practicing survival cooking will transform the food from basic life-saving nutrition to yummy and comforting sustenance.

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