Three Square

Dutch Oven Bourbon Banana Bread

With a fluffy center and slightly caramelized bottom, this Dutch oven banana bread tastes like having dessert for breakfast. What’s great about this recipe is a lot of the ingredients can be mixed ahead of time. At home, you can whisk together the flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, salt, and baking soda and put it in a single resealable container. Then when you’re on site, all you need to do is muddle together the wet ingredients in a bowl and combine it with your dry ingredient mix. Voilà, banana bread batter!

Dutch ovens tend to trap a lot of moisture when cooking, essentially baking and steaming at the same time. This wet heat is not ideal for traditional breads, but it’s amazing for banana bread. All the trapped steam helps keep the bread light and super moist.

When we’re cooking banana bread, we aim for a gentle heat somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 degrees. We place roughly 15 coals on top of our 10-inch Dutch oven and 5 coals on bottom. A little crispness on the top of the bread is fine, but you want to avoid accidentally burning the bottom. To keep the moisture inside, it’s best to keep the oven sealed for at least 30 minutes, then crack it open to check it. The smell that rushes out is pure heaven.

Once the bread is finished baking, remove it from the Dutch oven and let it cool for a few minutes. Our bread is usually gone before it’s cooled!

Teriyaki Beef Jerky

Once you discover how easy it is to make your own teriyaki beef jerky using a dehydrator, you’ll never go back to store-bought again: It’s sweet, tangy, and dangerously addictive.

With such limited daylight during the fall, it’s a shame to spend it cooking a sit-down lunch. That’s why we prefer to pack snacks that allow us to spend more time exploring, and beef jerky is one of our favorites because it’s loaded with protein and keeps us powered for hours. The only problem is it can be expensive. But now that we’ve purchased a dehydrator, all it takes is a little foresight and we can have as much beef jerky as we want.

When dehydrating meat it’s recommended to find the leanest possible cut. So we look for cuts like eye of round, top round, or bottom round. If it comes as a roast, we partially freeze the meat to make it easier to cut and slice it into eighth- or quarter-inch medallions. If it comes in steaks, we cut widthwise into strips.

This recipe replicates the classic teriyaki flavor of store-bought jerky but with fresh ingredients. Of course, you can just use your favorite pre-made teriyaki sauce if you like, but we find building it ourselves produces a milder, less aggressive teriyaki flavor, which we prefer.

At the end, we have a giant batch of delicious homemade beef jerky that should last us way longer than it actually does!

Beer Bratwurst with Sauerkraut

Nothing captures the spirit of fall like an Oktoberfest-inspired campfire dinner. A beer in one hand, a sauerkraut-laden bratwurst in the other. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

We’ve made campfire brats plenty of times and never thought they needed a “recipe.” How hard can it be to place bratwurst on a grill? But we’ve started using a new technique that we think really improves the whole system.

The main issue we’ve had with brats is overcooking on the outside and undercooking on the inside. This is usually caused by too high of heat and results in burst skin that releases all the delicious juices. The way to avoid this? Poach first, grill second.

In a cast iron skillet, we dump the entire container of sauerkraut, pour in half a beer, mix in some mustard, and then nestle in our bratwurst. We place the skillet over the hot part of the fire until it starts to bubble and then move it over to lower heat to simmer. This poaches the sausages in the flavorful liquid, ensuring they’re fully cooked. When we’re getting close to meal time, we toss the sausages on the hot side of the grill just long enough to char the outside. Then we can pop them back into the skillet to keep them warm until everyone is ready.

This process takes all the guesswork out of cooking sausage over an open fire, so we can spend less time poking and prodding and more time relaxing. Which, after all, is the whole point.