Cowboy cooking inspiring me to think about Dutch oven

My wife and I have been binge watching a new show on YouTube. Kent Rollins Cowboy Cooking has apparently been around a long while, but we’ve just stumbled onto his videos in the last few months.

I put it on the tube one night before either of us had slumbered off to siesta time in our recliners and three or four episodes later we were still both awake and hooked on this Oklahoma cowboy named Kent Rollins and his chuck wagon and outdoor cooking.

He hams it up in high cowboy style. He does a silly little dance after taking a first bite of any recipe. I think my wife likes the fact that he always has anywhere between two to five dogs around camp anytime he cooks and every dog gets a sample. That happens to be my wife’s way of operating at the dining table herself.

We’ve watched him cook all the cowboy campfire classics in Dutch ovens from biscuits to stew, cobblers and more. He also likes to recreate fast food favorites from various restaurants on the grill and atop his cowboy cook stove Big Bertha, though he usually cowboys them up with jalapenos or twice as much beef or cheese.

We even saw him bake a loaf of bread in the style of the Argentine gauchos by placing the dough directly into a campfire and covering with hot ash to bake. It worked!

I’ve cooked lots of things over and in a campfire myself, though, strangely enough, I’ve never had a Dutch oven.

I’ve cooked lots and lots of fish over open coals. One of my favorite memories was the first time I wrapped trout in foil and cooked it directly on the coals. We were up near Lake Katherine in the Pecos Wilderness and I had found wild onion and I had a lemon that we sliced over them. I was the hero both for catching and cooking those fish.

One spring in the Gila Wilderness we caught so many brook trout, stranded in pools before spring runoff, that we had fish three meals a day. We packed out nearly as much food as we packed that trip. We cooked in butter in a frying pan on a grate over a campfire that time but I’ve also cooked them impromptu on a green willow stick over the fire. It doesn’t matter much how you cook them if you cook trout on the banks of the same water as what you pulled them from.

I’m loving my pellet smoker on the back porch and for years I’ve grilled out year-round, even with 8 inches of snow on the deck in Colorado.

I know a few folks with chuck wagon rigs and even sponsored them in a few years when I was promoting Ag Expo. I really don’t have much desire to own a chuck wagon myself, but I’m starting to think about investing in a Dutch oven.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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