Your first weekend of open fire cooking

Most people get their first campfire cook wrong: they try to cook over flames. Fire cooking is coal cooking. Here's the mental shift and the real skill curve for your first dozen fires.

By Colin B. · Published June 12, 2026

Open fire cooking has exactly one piece of counterintuitive knowledge at its center, and if you learn it before you start, everything else falls into place: you are not cooking over a fire. You are cooking over coals.

Active flames are too hot, too uneven, and too unpredictable to cook on reliably. What you want is the patient, even, controllable heat that comes after the flames die down: orange-red coals covered with a thin layer of white ash. Getting there takes 45 to 60 minutes from a full fire. Your first job is building and tending a fire until it’s ready to cook on, and that is a skill in itself.

Day one: Build the fire, then cook

Start your fire earlier than you think you need to. If you want to eat at 7pm, your fire should be lit by 5:30pm. Sounds like a lot of lead time. It’s not.

Use hardwood (oak, hickory, apple, or whatever local split wood is available). Softwoods like pine burn fast and produce resins that make food taste off. Avoid charcoal for your first fire; learn to read natural wood coals first, then add charcoal technique later when you understand what you’re managing.

Build a log-cabin or tepee structure. Once it’s going, add wood steadily until you have a fire big enough to generate a serious coal bed (six to eight logs’ worth for a Dutch oven cook). Then stop adding wood and let it burn.

How do you know when it’s ready? The flames die down. The coals glow orange-red with a ring of white ash forming on the outer edges. You can hold your hand about 10 inches above the coals for three seconds before pulling away. That’s roughly 350–400°F, the right temperature for most Dutch oven recipes.

Setting up your Dutch oven

The first time most beginners open a camp Dutch oven over a fire, they put it directly on the coals and pile more coals on top. This is correct, and it’s also surprising: you are essentially building a little oven inside the fire ring.

The standard setup for 350°F in a 12-inch Dutch oven:

• Place 8 coals in a ring underneath the Dutch oven legs
• Place 16 coals on the lid in an even pattern
• Check every 15-20 minutes; rotate the lid a quarter turn and the oven base a quarter turn in the opposite direction to prevent hot spots

That two-to-one ratio (more coals on top than below) is the baking setup. For stews and soups where you mostly need bottom heat, flip the ratio: more coals underneath, just a ring on the lid to keep moisture from escaping.

Temperature isn’t precise in this work. You’re managing a range, not a setting. The goal is to keep the coals alive and even for the duration of the cook, usually 45 minutes to 2 hours depending on what you’re making. Add fresh coals from the fire as the original ones fade.

Your first cook: Dutch oven chili

The best first fire-cooking recipe is a Dutch oven chili. It’s forgiving (a wider temperature range is fine), it takes about 90 minutes of coal time, and it introduces you to the lid-and-coals method without requiring precision.

Brown ground beef or chopped chuck in the Dutch oven over direct flame before moving to coals. Add canned tomatoes, beans, chili powder, garlic, cumin. Lid on, coal setup, 90 minutes. Check at 45 minutes, stir, add coals if they’re fading. Eat.

You will almost certainly overcook or undercook something on your first attempt. That’s fine. The lesson isn’t in a perfect chili. The lesson is in watching what happens to the coals over time, how the temperature shifts as they fade, and what the Dutch oven looks like at different stages.

The mistakes beginners make (and that you will too)

Cooking over flames instead of coals. The most common one. When you see smoke rising from your food and the outside is charred but the inside is raw, you cooked over flames. Let the fire burn down longer.

Not rotating the oven and lid. Hot spots form where the coals are unevenly placed. Every 15-20 minutes, a quarter turn on the lid and a quarter turn in the opposite direction on the base evens out the cook. Skipping this gives you cornbread that’s burned on one side and raw on the other.

Opening the lid too often. Every time you open the Dutch oven, you lose 10-15 minutes of built-up heat. Set a timer and commit to not opening it until the check interval.

Using too much food. A 12-inch Dutch oven makes 6-quart portions, but filling it to the brim leaves no headroom for steam and makes uneven heat worse. Fill to about two-thirds capacity on your first few cooks.

Not bringing enough water for the fire. The bucket of water or camp fire extinguisher isn’t for when things go wrong. It’s for managing errant coals, controlling flare-ups, and fully extinguishing at the end of the night. Bring it before you light the match.

What changes after a few fires

Around your third or fourth cook, you’ll stop being anxious about whether it’s working and start actually watching the coals. You’ll notice the difference between a good bed of mature coals and a bed of coals that’s too fresh and still crackling. You’ll start reading the sizzle inside the Dutch oven without opening it. You’ll have an instinct for when to add coals and when to let it ride.

That’s when this hobby becomes genuinely enjoyable, when you’re not troubleshooting anymore but just cooking outside, managing a fire, and producing something real from the process.

From there, the progression is natural: bread in the Dutch oven, then a roast, then trying the tripod setup, then eventually moving beyond chili and stew into the broader world of campfire recipes. Every one of those skills builds on reading coals and managing heat. The foundation is the same.

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