Know How to Build a Campfire for Cooking Campfire Recipes

When it’s your turn to be the camp cook, knowing how to build a campfire, and the right layout to use for your campfire recipes is critical.

Veteran campfire cooks will tell you that a fire built for cooking is more than a pile of flaming firewood.

If you are going to be doing more than just roasting hot dogs or marshmallows, you will need more than just an open flame fire.


Most campfire recipes call for using some cooking techniques that use the even heat of hot coals too.

When you are not restricted to a contained fire ring or other pre-made fire enclosure, and have flexibility in deciding how to build a campfire for cooking, the key-hole layout gives you the best of both kinds of camp cooking.

With just a little thought about how to build a campfire, picking the right campfire layout in the beginning will give you great cooking results later.



Since most campfire recipes will call for both open flame, and hot-coals cooking, a campfire layout that gives you both options will make the cook’s job a lot easier.

The key-hole campfire layout will do just that.

It is shaped just like the name implies.

There is a main circular fire area, usually about 3 feet across, and a smaller “nub” that will be the hot-coals cooking area, usually about 18 inches across.

Combined, these two areas form the “key-hole” layout and allow you to have direct flame heat, and a more controlled heat over the hot coals.



Because there will be a lot of activity around a cooking campfire, it is recommended that you have a border around the fire, either rocks, logs, or large pieces of firewood.

This will keep tumbling embers from rolling out of the fire, and stray boot toes from getting too close.

You can use a camping tripod to suspend your cooking pot over the open flames of the main campfire, and use the smaller hot coals area for cast iron Dutch oven or griddle and skillet cooking.

The larger circular area will be the main campfire and will be used to supply coals and embers to the hot-coals cooking area, so it is best to start with a good-sized flaming campfire.

Unlike trying to build a campfire just to sit around and enjoy, where you typically start with a small tee-pee of tinder and slowly add bigger pieces of firewood to build the fire to the size you want, with a cooking campfire you know you want a larger fire for both flames and hot coals.


So for a key-hole campfire layout start with a larger tee-pee of tinder and a lot of firewood to get a good “roaring” flame going, this will make the hot coals as the fire settles down and you are ready to start cooking that secret campfire recipe.

When the coals and hot embers are ready, rake them out of the main fire into the smaller hot-coals area.

It is important to spread these coals evenly in the smaller hot-coals cooking area to avoid having hot-spots under your camp griddle or cast iron skillet.

The amount of coals needed will depend on the cooking methods used for the campfire recipe you are making, particularly if you will be doing any cast iron Dutch oven cooking.

The bed of hot coals can be continually replenished from the main campfire as you cook.

The key-hole campfire layout is a good design for cooking because it gives you both open-flame and hot-coals heat sources, but it has an added benefit.

When all the camp cooking and clean-up is done, just toss some more wood into your main campfire circle and you will have the perfect campfire to sit around enjoying a good cup of coffee, as your camping buddies rave about how delicious that secret campfire recipe was.


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