Campfire baked potatoes; the easiest camping side possible

If you’ve been camping for some time, and have never done campfire baked potatoes in aluminium foil, you’ve been missing out! It’s one of the simplest, quickest and tastiest ways to get your serve of vegetables, and we make a habit of doing it from time to time.

We eat a fair bit of potato when camping as it keeps really well, is filling and relatively healthy, and having different ways to cook it has become greatly appreciated.

If you haven’t added this to your Camp Cooking options, you absolutely should. We often use it as a side for some of our 50 easy camping meals.

Campfire baked potatoes in the fire
Cooking potatoes on the fire is super easy and tasty

What do you need?

You literally need as many potatoes as you want to cook, and a roll of aluminium foil.

How to cook campfire baked potatoes

The best way to do this is to pick evenly sized potatoes, so they all cook evenly over the same time. If you have odd sized ones you’ll often end up with the small ones getting burnt, or the large ones not fully cooked.

Get one potato, and wrap it in aluminium foil. We usually double wrap it so it doesn’t get punctured (but if you are careful you can avoid doing this), and then when you have them all ready, drop them onto the coals of a fire. You want them to get hot, but not to be sitting in the flames, or where its roasting hot or they’ll burn.

We find on the edge of the fire is perfect, with some coals pulled out and a few fresh coals dropped on. They generally take about an hour to cook, and we rotate them a couple of times in that time. You will need a decent set of tongs, and some welding gloves are very much appreciated too!

Spuds on the fire
Cook them on reasonable heat, but not in the flames

What do you end up with?

You should end up with a perfectly cooked potato, with the skin on and ready to eat. Cut them in halves or quarters, put a bit of salt and butter on and you are onto the perfect side. If you cook them further, you can end up with dark (sometimes black) skin that can be a bit crunchy (although some people like it), but a bit is often tasty.

If you do manage to make them look like charcoal, don’t write it off. You can often cut them in half and scoop the insides out, and just throw the charcoal into the fire. Yes, you can end up with the whole thing as charcoal, in which case you take it as a learning experience that you left them on too long, or had it too hot! This is pretty rare though, as they’re very forgiving.

If you are careful, you can pull a potato out and unwrap it to see if its done, or you can just use a skewer to see if it goes through well. If its hard, or crunchy it probably needs more time.

Campfire baked potatoes and pumpkin
You’ll end up with perfectly cooked spuds (and pumpkin if you do it)

Can you do this with other vegetables?

Yep, and thinking about it we should try more. We’ve done it with pumpkin and sweet potato before, but I reckon carrots would probably be delicious, as would beetroot!

Roast spuds and pumpkin
You can do it with a heap of different vegetables

Have you done campfire baked potatoes before? You should!

Sharing is caring!

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *