Cooking Roast in the Ground & Elk Hunting Camp 2017

Elk Hunting Camp 2017 is officially over. It was a small group this year – only about 22 of us – but we still had a good time despite the wind on the first day.

I put together this little video of our camping trip that you might enjoy watching.

I wanted to share with you a little more about the deep pit cooking we do one night.

Before we left home, we took chuck roast and seasoned it with salt, pepper and garlic powder, placed some sliced onion along with rosemary from our garden on top, wrapped it in parchment paper and then in 3 layers of foil. I like the parchment paper because I don’t want my meat to be in contact with the foil for all those hours of cooking.

Normally, I would have frozen it ahead of time, but I forgot to do it this time around.

 

The day before we were to have roast for supper, I had the boys dig me a pit.

 

I have an enamel roaster pan that I use just for this purpose. It’s been hit a few times with a shovel when we’re taking the roast from the ground but it still works for our purposes.

I started a fire in the pit and kept it burning all afternoon. I don’t know how necessary it is to start the day before but my thinking is it’s heating the earth and then when I put the roast in, the energy of the heat goes just to the roast. But that’s all an unproved and untested theory since I’ve never done it any other way. 🙂

 

I even threw some rocks into the pit so we could have some hot stones.

 

On Day 2 we set the roaster insert on top of the coals and then set our roasts on top of that. Keep in mind that we are using pine wood. It’ really hard to get a pile of coals because it burns to nothing. I don’t know how it would work if you were using a hard wood.

 

You can see the roaster insert in this picture.

 

Set the roaster over the top of the roasts.

 

Heap coals around the roast.

 

Russell wanted to put some foil on top of the roaster to help retain heat. It’s probably not a  necessary step but it was something we did.

 

Then you just completely cover your hole with the dirt you took out. If you see a lot of steam escaping from the ground, put more dirt on it and you can even step on it to compress the earth. Small wisps of smoke is fine but the more smoke coming out of the hole means the more heat you are losing.

 

We put the roast in around noon and left it all day until 6 that night. Then we dug it out of the ground and let it set for 30 minutes as we waited on the hunters to return from the evening hunt. It was still piping hot (because of the 3 layers of foil we had wrapped it in) and falling apart tender. In short, it was fabulous! The flavor was superb, too with the rosemary. Mmmm, yummy!

 

And with some other delicious sides including our Dutch Oven baked potatoes…

 

…we had a fantastic meal in the woods.

Has anyone ever tried deep pit cooking? I’d love to hear about it.