Hobo Stew and Corn Bread

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance outfitters in the pathfinder school when I'm out here right outside my overhang here at the classroom area and I'm burning just a bunch of scrap lumber that I've created over the last several projects and I'm going to go ahead and cook with that today and shoot a video and we're going to make a wilderness or a hobo stew whatever you choose to call it which basically means we're going to make a stew out of whatever we got left hanging around in the camp kitchen now that's a pretty simple process but what I want to do is I want to discuss a little bit about rationing food and making meals for larger groups of people you know the typical ideal number in a camp is about four people so you need to be able to cook for four people because there's no reason to having people cook for themselves at every meal if you can cook group meals and you can carry group implements to cook those meals and this gallon and a half milking bucket made out of stainless steel and just stainless steel pipe and fit over the top of this for a lid is a very good concept for cooking for larger groups like that it gives you a large container that you can cook in boil water in things like that it gives you a lid that can be used for other purposes as well that's just another piece of cookware but you're repurposing it as a lid and this concept is used by a lot of the people up in the north I've seen a lot of schools and bushcraft places up in Maine and place like that use a system like this especially if their canoe camping and things like that and Horace Kephart speaks vaguely in his book about a system of a larger bucket with a fitted lid that everything else or all your other cookware could fit down inside of now I would assume from reading the text in this book he's probably talking more about a garbage type pail but this milking pail works really really well for that it's fairly expensive to buy a large heavy-duty gauge stainless steel milking pail but it's a one-time investment for a group camp so the important thing today is how do we ration our food to make sure that we have enough in the pot for four people yet not used too much so that we're wasting food or that we have leftovers and get enough good wholesome food in there to feed those four people well so what we're going to do is we're going to make a wilderness or a hobo stew pretty simple process you're using anything you have left over in the camp cupboard we're going to use potatoes greens three dehydrated soup greens and we're just going to use some raw stock meat for this we're not going to use wild game although you could use any meat from wild game that you have leftover whether it's neck meat from a deer anything like that cut up pieces of racoon coyote it wouldn't really matter any scrap pieces of meat that you've got that aren't staked out you could use for this process we're just going to use beef today because I don't have any game meat right at hand here but the process will be exactly the same all right so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to add a gallon of water and get that heating up in our bucket I've got that going right now and then we're going to add whatever is going to take the longest to cook which is probably gonna be the meat potatoes to be honest with you but we'll go ahead and add the potatoes first and for a group of four people depending on the size of potatoes if you're using full size like a russet or an Idaho Potato you would probably put one to one-and-a-half potatoes per person in the group depending on how Hardy the group eats but for red potatoes which I use a lot because they're small they're easy to carry you can carry lots of them especially if you're camping or cooking for yourself I generally will use about three of those potatoes per person in the group so if we're cooking for four people we're going to want to quarter four potatoes and put them in the pot right off the bat okay I want to show you the product here real quick and this is not something I sell you get this on Amazon it's called a flexible cutting board and the cool thing about these is is that you can't roll these things up to put them in the camp kitchen or whatever it is you're traveling with you can roll this thing up pretty tight and put it in your Chet if you're cooking for a lot of people gives you something that you can cut on it's going to be nice and fairly clean of all you keep it that way so we're going to go ahead and cut out the core like I said three potatoes for each person so that's 12 potatoes over 1/4 up and I've just got an Old Hickory chef's knife I'm using here and then we're going to add this to the pot and we're going to add two beef bullion cubes all right so get our potatoes in there and then we'll take two beef bullion cubes here and we'll just open up my dudes up kind of break them up and throw them in there

oK we've got that going pretty well I'm going to go ahead and add a full large wooden spoon or scoop whichever you've got handy to use but a good full one for each person in the party

so we'll put four of those in okay so you can see we got plenty of heat coming out of this thing now I got water boiling over the top so now when you take this pie pan off here you're going to want to put gloves on to do it and once that thing's boiling up that good now we're going to add our meat now as far as our portions go I would say one handful of meat chunked per person in the party that gives you an easy measurement system get a good big handful and put one per person in the party in the stew pot now this leaves me with about a half a handful so I'm going to put one more in there for the pot call it good ok so all of these steps of adding ingredients and all of this stuff getting the fire set up takes place over the course of probably 20 minutes and that thing is ready to cook down now we haven't put any thickener in there other than the fact that we have the starch and potatoes that will thicken the stew so we'll put a little bit of biscuit mix and maybe a little bit of instant potatoes in there after it boils down to about half the volume we started out with and then we'll add some Old Bay seasoning of course I'm using the same adjustable trammel that I've been using a lot on this tripod and it's easy just to pick that thing up and lift it up to get it higher or lower to the flames when it starts to boil over like it is right now I lift it up a little bit it's a simple process it's made out of wood I got a video on it it's a real simple thing to make a few simple notches you've got to carve in it it's done this one's been out here on this tripod for ever since I shot the videos probably at least 4 or 5 months and it's still just as good as it was the day it was made so they work out real real good they're real simple to make it something you could do on the fly and not have to carry a chain of any kind now you're going to want to get in here during this and this a foot process every once in a while just kind of stir things off the bottom just to make sure nothing's getting stuck while you're cooking this down cook time on something like this is probably going to be at least an hour and a half lobster the game now really is to keep the fire pretty high around that pot get everything boiled so that you know the meats done the vegetables are rehydrated the potatoes are cooked and then you're building up that cold bed in the process and you can lower that pot down to a bed of coals and just feed it smaller material to cook that stew and thicken things up over time instead of wasting a lot of fuel wood for an hour and a half you burn that heavy fuel that you've got for the first half an hour 40 minutes everything after that should be coal based cooking so about 4045 minutes in now we have taken the lid off because now we want that steam to escape because we want a reduction in the liquid because now we're just going to stew which basically means we're going to cook it for a long time we've got our meat pretty well cooked now the potatoes are getting softer so now we're going to let this thing cook down and that will mean not adding a lot of fuel to our fire and generally lowering our pot down to cold level to keep this thing on a simmer right out of boil so that water and steam are still escaping and reducing but we're really not cooking things any further than they're already cooked that's already taken care of now now we're just going to try to thicken the stew up and cook it for a longer period to really get stuff soft and tastes an awesome I've kind of went over this and videos past but it's probably worth repeating you've got a couple ways with a system like this to be able to adjust your food over the fire one thing you can do if you need to raise it up a little bit as you can lift your tripod and adjust those legs in or out depending on what you want for height though the fire and then your micro adjustments come from this adjustable trammel system so that you can lower or raise that stuff off of the fire itself and it's a very simple system of notches and loops that allow you to do that that can be carved very quickly in the woods and will last a long time it can having this pot covered in the beginning accomplishes a couple things a it keeps ashes out of your food when your fire is high and you're building things up and getting things on the boil be it traps the heat inside this container more so that heats up faster any covered pot is going to boil faster than an uncovered pot so those are the reasons for covering the pot to begin with and now that we have everything boiled and we want the steam to escape faster and the liquid to reduce quicker we don't want to trap the steam we want to escape as fast as possible to reduce the amount of liquid we have in here so that we can make our stew so that's what we're doing now alright so once we've let that thing cook down for how to know if I've been an hour nothing like that from the time we started we're going to now use some of this biscuit mix that we've got we're just going to put a couple spoonfuls in there like this about three and I'm just using a carved wooden spoon here they used for coffee and things like that in chocolate if you get used to measuring with what you've got doesn't have to be 1 tablespoon 1 teaspoon you know it becomes ok if I use a scoop of this if I use a ladle of that that's going to give you what you need now I'm going to put an equal amount of potatoes in here what I'm doing is basically going by one scoop per person I'm trying to feed so if I got four people on feeding I'm using four scoops because I usually use one for myself and this will help to thicken things up now the last thing I'm going to add to this pot is I'm only going to use one full scoop of Old Bay maybe a scoop and a quarter and then I'm going to stir the pot things should start to thicken up pretty quick after that once we get this thing down to where we want it we can then cover our pot again and let simmer over the coals okay guys so while our students coming down I'm going to show you another quick dirty trick what I've got here is I have the lid to my bush pot I have two stainless steel dog bowls you see me use these things lots and lots of videos especially in the discount bushcraft kit these are going to create a Dutch oven this is going to be a platform to keep what we're cooking in the Dutch oven off the very bottom to keep it from burning and it fits in there almost perfect as you can see so here's what we're going to do we're going to take a bag of north of white just add water cornbread mix gotta have something chop up all this to it right so we're going to make ourselves some corn bread here and all we're going to do is the same thing that we've been doing with this we're going to add water to the bag just like this and mix it right in the back not dirtied up in front of dishes by doing that you just want enough water in there to make this pretty thick when you get it all mixed up okay so to prep this Dutch oven for cooking we're going to take the Dutch oven itself and we're going to drop our lid upside down creating air space between the bottom and the lid then we're going to get some of our cornbread mix here and we're just going to shovel it right into the middle just like this just give yourself a good pancake there now we're going to take the second Bowl and put it over the top and we're going to use just a couple of these paper clips just like this to keep it closed and head for the fire all right so now we're going to take our stew I'm going to move it off to the side just a little bit it doesn't take much to have to do that we just move the tripod just a shade and that's going to move it off to the side then we're going to take these good hardwood coals we got here crush them up a little bit move some of them out of the way and off to the side drop this oven right in the bed just like that and move that big piece out of the way don't really want him in there and then we'll take this stuff that we shovel to the side put it on the top just like that and one of the things I'll generally do is I'll come in here turn this dude a half a turn about ten minutes in just like you would a Dutch oven alright so the first plate is going to go to Rufus here I'm going to use our lid for that you're getting over buddy alright so we got our polka Bowl here ourselves filled up check our cornbread all right so we got your stupid air cooling down Rufus has got some cool in there now get our cornbread out of here just wipe the ash off of that dude real good we just need to take our clips off set them aside we go there's our cornbread okay guys I'm kind of fighting wind here a little bit when to give you a comment up close here at this stoop it's pretty good here

got a little bit burned on one side the cornbread here on the side like it came out real good look at that looks real nice

time to eat all right well as usual Rufus ass is completely done before I gets first bite but now I see why man holy cow guys awesome

look cornbread man man I would go down great on a cold winter night for sure just a right amount of heat we had old bad man roofs can't beat that with a stick buddy let me get you some more Oh folks I'm Dave Canterbury what's up lights out there's in the Pathfinder school appreciation we made over this quick video today on how to make hobo or wilderness to a little bit of cornbread a little trip or trick about how to make a Dutch oven and cook it in a bucket I appreciate your views and I appreciate your support and thank you for anything you do for school for family for business following our sponsors instructors affiliates and Friends I'll be back then to the video this is okay thanks guys

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