Pit Cooking Potatoes for a Crowd
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- potatoes
- oil
- foil
With plenty of toppings like:
- sour cream
- cheese
- crumbled cooked bacon
- sliced scallions
- salsa
- chopped onions
- butter
- chili-with and without meat
- nacho cheese
- steamed broccoli
- salt and pepper
My "Roughing it Easy" book says " Wash potatoes and oil the skins if you like them soft, then put in a black pot with a lid or in a jar with a lid. Cooking time is usually 3 hours." (not practical with a really large group).
My "Pocket Stew" says "wrap potato in foil and bake in coals or buried in sand under fire." (We would put all the potatoes in a layer in a ring or two, cover them with a layer of sand. Light coals and let them burndown to ash, then spread them over top of the sand. I think it will probably take an hour or two to cook the potatoes. I think the sand would insulate them enough so they won't burn. I hope the campground won't mind an extra inch of sand in their fire rings! )
My "Everything Tastes better Outdoors" book says " Potatoes can be speared on a spit or laid on the grill, or they can be put straight in the ashes as they are. But it is less messy and more popular to wrap them, well scrubbed, in foil. They need 1 to 1 1/2 hours on the grill, depending on their size, less among the hot embers." (I think grilling sounds better than burying in the ash. If we can get some big grills this would probably work..you could turn the potatoes better than the sand method and you would know when they were ready to come off the fire. We might bring oven racks..or buy HEAVY duty wire mesh from Home Depot to make a rack..maybe we could borrow some grills from council??)
We could also lite our coals and let them burn down, piled the potatoes on a grill and then covered the whole thing with a foil "lid" to keep the heat "in".
Here's the "after the encampment" report on camp baked potatoes. Doug Ernst suggested that we should wrap the washed potatoes in pop-up foils, pack them into an oven (we got 5 dads to each cook 60 potatoes). Bake for 3 hours at 350 degrees then put them into cardboard lined coolers (the "pit") and bring them to camp and let them sit for another 3 hours. They turned out perfect! They were soft and all were cooked through. Webought the potatoes wholesale for about .25 each and each troop brought a different topping: cheese, sour cream, butter, chives, bacon bits, chili with and without meat, nacho cheese, broccoli, salsa, salt and pepper. We supplemented dinner with a big salad and lots of rolls. The kids and adults both liked it and many of us cooked hash browns in the morning with leftover potatoes.
