How to Build a Campfire Designed for Your Campfire Recipes

Knowing how to build a campfire, and what layout to use, for cooking those delicious campfire recipes is the starting point for a good camp cook. Any veteran campfire cook will tell you that a fire built for cooking is more than a flaming pile of firewood. If you are doing more than just roasting marshmallows or hot dogs, you will need more than just open flames, most campfire recipes call for using some hot coals cooking techniques too.

If you have the choice of laying out your own design, and are not restricted to a contained fire ring or other pre-made fire enclosure, the key-hole layout gives you the best of both kinds of campfire cooking. You can get great cooking results with just a little thought about how you construct your fire.

The key-hole layout is shaped just like the name implies. It has a main circular fire area, usually about 2 - 3 feet across, and a smaller protruding "nub" that will be the hot-coals cooking area, usually about 18 inches wide and deep. Combined, these two areas allow you to have direct flame heat over the main campfire and a more controlled heat over the hot coals. It is also recommended that you have a border around this layout, either rocks, logs, or large pieces of firewood, this will keep stray boot toes from getting too close to the flames and coals. You can set-up a camping tripod over the main fire to suspend your cooking pot over the flames, and use the hot coals area for cast iron Dutch oven or griddle and skillet cooking.

The main campfire in the circular area will be used to feed coals and embers to the hot-coals cooking area, so it is best to start with a good-sized flaming campfire. Unlike a campfire built just to sit around and enjoy, where you typically start with a small tee-pee of tinder and slowly add larger fuel to build the fire to the size you want, you know you want a larger fire to generate your hot coals. So for this campfire layout start with a larger tee-pee of tinder and a lot of firewood to get a good "roaring" flame going, this will make the supply of hot coals as the fire settles down and you are ready to start cooking that secret campfire recipe. When the coals and hot embers are ready, rake them out of the main campfire into the smaller hot-coals area. Spread these coals evenly in your cooking area to avoid have hot-spots under your camp griddle or cast iron skillet. The amount of coals needed will depend on the cooking methods used for the campfire recipe you are making, and the bed of hot coals can be continually replenished from the main campfire as you cook.

The key-hole layout is a good design for campfires that will be used for cooking because it gives you both open-flame and hot-coals heat sources, but it has another added benefit. When all the camp cooking is done, just toss some more wood into your main campfire circle and you will have the perfect campfire to sit around and enjoy a good cup of coffee, as your camping buddies tell you how delicious that secret campfire recipe was.