The other day we were cleaning our gear here at home after a weekend camping trip and I spent a lot of time scrubbing the outside of a fire-blackened pot we had used to heat chili over the campfire. I could have saved myself a lot of elbow grease if I had bothered to soap the outside of the pot.
Using soap to create an easy-to-clean coating on the outside of your cooking pots one tip that really works when it comes to cleaning up after campfire cooking. It’s an old trick that used to be mentioned in the Boy Scout Handbook but that many campers seem to have forgotten – or maybe they were never Boy Scouts. It’s as simple as soaping the outside of your pots and pans to make cleanup easy.
Put a little liquid dish soap on a paper towel and spread the soap around the outside of the pot you are using for campfire cooking. An even film on the outside of the pot works best. Bar soap also does the trick but is harder to spread evenly. I have even seen this done with shampoo.
When it comes time to do the dishes, that black soot on the outside of the pot will come off much more easily so that you aren’t left scrubbing at a sooty mess. Just make sure you don’t get too crazy with the soap and get any on the inside of your campfire cooking pot because soap doesn’t do much to improve the flavor of most dishes!
