Community Outdoor Cooking
by Emily McLennan
Community gardens and orchards are great locations to bring people together to cook and share a meal. There are so many benefits to cooking outdoors in community settings, for example:
Cooking with freshly picked produce gives the maximum flavour and vitamins in the food. You get the chance to experiment and use what is ripe and ready to pick and try new flavour combinations.
Increased physical activity: working outside you tend to move around more, collecting wood and tending the fire, setting up equipment and collecting the ingredients.
Social benefits: communities get the chance to work together and bond over a common activity. Sharing food is a great way to build conversation and community.
Mental health: being out in nature helps people to relax and reduces stress, natural light is good for our health and increases vitamin D. Connecting with others reduces loneliness and improves wellbeing. Many people love to sit and watch a fire to relax.
Heat sources.
From gas or wood fired stoves, wood fired pizza ovens and barbeques there are a wide range of options available. Consider which heat source would work best in your setting, make sure you have a stable base to work on, have somewhere to safely put cookware when you take it off the heat, and a bucket of cold water nearby. You will also need to consider where you can wash and prepare your ingredients and clean up at the end.
At FEL we have delivered many outdoor cooking sessions, for example:
- Apple crumble – stewing the apples on a woodfired stove and then baking in a wood fired pizza oven.
- Warm fennel and squash salad cooked on the fire. For this session we wanted to teach participants how to cook with vegetables they were less familiar with using.
- Vegetable soup cooked on the fire is a great dish to make at the end of the season as autumn approaches.
- Fruit compote is another recipe that can use up leftover fruit at the end of the season and can be served with sponge, cream or custard.
