We are pleased to announce that The MeatEater Outdoor Cookbook: Wild Game Recipes for the Grill, Smoker, Campstove, and Campfire is now available! Check out an excerpt from the introduction below.
“One summer, when I was nine or ten, my dad put me to work with a hammer and chisel removing the old mortar from a pickup-truckload of red bricks that he’d salvaged from a demolished building. I was then tasked with stirring batches of fresh mortar with a garden hoe while my dad and a friend named Eugene built a gigantic fire ring in our backyard down by the lake. For the next decade or so, that fire ring served as a sort of laboratory for adolescent experiments in outdoor cooking.
Through an endless litany of burns and scalds on our hands, my neighborhood buddies and I fine-tuned the making of sassafras tea (add lots of sugar), botched multiple attempts at roasting whole chipmunks, incinerated dozens of foil-wrapped potatoes that were buried beneath the coals for too long, fried countless bluegill caught from the lake, and made so many “hobo pies” (nowadays, these are more politely referred to as iron pies) that we’d frequently drain a tub of margarine in a single cooking session and then melt the polypropylene container over the heat of the fire because we liked the crazy zipping sound that the material made when it dripped into the flames.
All of it tasted amazing! Even the burned and desiccated potatoes were a treat once you became accustomed to the grittiness of wood ash. But the actual flavors and textures of the meals had little to do with how much I loved them. Instead, I was drawn to the labor, ingenuity, and ever-so-slight danger involved with outdoor cooking. And I was inspired by the environment. While cooking outside, the walls and ceiling of a conventional indoor kitchen were replaced by the open sky and the lake. A humming exhaust fan and the background noise of TV became wind through the trees and birdsong. While cooking in that environment, I couldn’t help but feel connected to something deep and eternal about my own human experience.” —Steven Rinella
A bit about the book: Featuring 100+ recipes for cooking outside, it’s a follow-up to our 2018 bestseller, The MeatEater Fish & Game Cookbook. There’s something here for everyone who loves the outdoors, from backyard grill masters to backcountry big game hunters. Each chapter covers a different outdoor cooking method—grilling, smoking, cooking over coals. Throughout, recipes are tagged for backyard cooking, car camping, or backpacking.
Along with recipes, Steve explains essential outdoor cooking techniques like how to build the perfect outdoor kitchen for any scenario and what it takes to maintain a fire. With preparations ranging from simple backcountry chow to guest-worthy showstoppers, The MeatEater Outdoor Cookbook is the essential companion for anyone who wants to eat well in the wild.
Click here to order your copy now!
Too hungry to wait for your book to arrive? Get cooking right now with this Ancho Cola Jerky recipe from the book. And stay tuned for more recipe drops in the weeks to come.
