Tips for No Fail Foil Dinners

I love foil dinners! It’s probably half the reason I love camping so much. Cooking over a fire can be so fun and so frustrating at the same time. There is nothing worse than charcoaled meat and hard potatoes! I have been working on perfecting foil dinners for a long time and here are the tips that I have found make for the best dinners!

• To start off use the right foil! This is not the time to be cheap. Use heavy duty foil – it makes a world of difference.
• Use Cooking spray. Before you put anything onto your foil, spray your foil with cooking spray. No more stuck dinner all over the inside.
• Use bite sized pieces of meat! Do not put a huge patty of hamburger or a whole chicken breast into your foil. There are two reasons why – The first is that by the time you get the middle cooked – the outside is burnt. The second reason is they are so much easier to eat. No need to use a knife, which always cut straight through the foil and the paper plate. Bonus – you don’t have to cut up kids meals either. When we are camping we just open our foil up on a paper plate and eat it out of the foil. I like to make meatballs out of ground beef, or I cut the chicken into bite sized pieces to put inside.
• If you are putting hard veggies in the foil meal make sure to cut them up small. Things like potatoes – I do no larger than inch cubes. I also usually use baby carrots because they cook faster.
• When you are done wrapping the dinner tuck both ends under the same side. I usually wrap it a second time and do the same thing but this time on the other side. This gives extra protection between the food and the fire. You can also flip the dinner and no matter what you will have good protection on every side. You can see this process more clearly in this post.
• Make sure you cook in coals and not the flames. Let your fire heat up and burn down some coals and move those out of the main fire. Place your dinner on those and you can even place a few coals on the top. You can also even cook foil dinners on briquettes on the side of the fire.
• I don’t know what it is about campfire dinners, but they need more seasoning than normal dinners in my opinion.  So, keep that in mind. Don’t over do it by any means, but definitely don’t forget the salt and pepper!!

If you have any other tips that have worked for you please share them in the comments! If you want a couple of yummy recipes check here and here.

Happy Camping!

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