Below are five primitive cooking methods for you to learn about and enjoy. Post-collapse you'll be glad that you took the time to learn these cooking techniques. Take some notes and consider what you would like to try OR take notes for the future!

Ash Cooking
First you need to make a fire slowly let it die while flattening the surface with coals of a fire. The coals should be hot but no longer burning (with flames).
While the coals are getting hot, find some very large leaves that you can use to cook the food in. Remember that the leaves need to be large enough so that they can be wrapped around the food, but they also have to be non-poisonous so that you don’t ingest toxins.
Broiling
Start constructing your “broiler” by bending one piece of wood into an oval, and crossing the bottom of the oval with another straight stick (think of an upper case D). Use small twigs or vine to tie the oval-shaped wood onto the straight stick, but you can stretch the top piece so that it reaches down the entire straight piece of wood. Then, if you wish to make the wood even more stable, add smaller pieces of wood across the two pieces of wood. This will give support to the food and if you’re handy enough, will also allow you to move the wood up and down to fit specific pieces of food.
Once you have your “broiler” set up, you just need to attach the food to it. When cooking fish, you can do this just by piercing the skin onto some of the wood, and for larger pieces, you can simply lay it across. Then just hold the broiler several inches from the flame to keep it from burning, and keep it flat to keep your food from falling in.
Hot Stone Cooking
You can cook with stone one of two ways. You can either use a small stone for a single serving, or you can place many stones over a low and wide fire, using them to cook larger quantities or larger pieces of food. For a larger area you’ll need to let the stones heat up for at least an hour, whereas you can probably get away with fifteen minutes or so for just a single stone.
Steam Pit Cooking
When digging the pit, make sure you dig it at least a foot to two feet deep. This will be large enough to not only hold the food, but also make sure no steam escapes while cooking. Once the pit has been dug, line the bottom of it with charcoal. Light the coal, again just like you did when ash cooking, and wait for it to get very hot and then die down. Then, place your food over top of the coals and then cover it with the earth you dug up. Allow it to sit for at least a couple of hours (even small food will take a while to cook this way), and then dig it up, and dig in!
Spit Cooking
While tying a piece of meat onto a piece of wood and turning it over an open fire sounds easy, spit cooking does come with its own unique set of issues. To begin with, any meat that can be tied to the spit must be tied to the spit. This will keep the meat sturdy on the spit and will keep it from bouncing around. Also, it’s important to remember that meat shrinks when it cooks, so even if you think you’ve tied the meat closely to the spit, it still might not be close enough. Use wire, vines, or twine to really secure the meat onto the spit. If you’re roasting a whole animal, also be sure to tie up the limbs. If you don’t the center of gravity will be thrown off and the meat will once again bounce around the spit instead of clinging to it.
Remember too that if you don’t turn the spit, you’re broiling, not spit cooking. Out in the wilderness, and especially in survival situations, you likely won’t have a spit that automatically turns for you, so you’ll have to sit by the fire and manually rotate it yourself.

All of the above are fantastic primitive ways to prepare your food in the wilderness but there is more to learn about each method and you can read up on them over on Ask a Prepper. There are also a couple of bonus methods of cooking too!

Perhaps you already have a tried and true method of cooking outdoors but it never hurts to learn more. Next time you go out camping try one of the above, something different than what you usually do, and see how you do!

Featured Image via Ask a Prepper