Wilderness Chef by Ray Mears

The first cookbook from outdoors legend Ray Mears, Wilderness Chef shows you how to cook delicious, flavoursome food in the open air, whether in the wilderness or your own garden.

Ray Mears has spent his life travelling the world, living with and learning from trackers, adventurers and indigenous peoples in the desert, the rainforests and the Arctic north. In this book he shares a delicious array of his most popular recipes, tried-and-tested for all levels of skill and in all conditions whether in the garden or the wild, from quick and tasty meals to opulent gourmet feasts.

Opening with advice on setting up your outdoor kitchen, Ray shows how to light a fire, cook in ashes and leaves, steam, smoke and build a simple ground oven.

He then shares his fabulous and enjoyable recipes, including:

• easy ideas that children and grownups can try (campfire s’mores, wilderness hot dog, egg on a stick)
• gourmet meals (Italian hunter’s rabbit, succulent split-stick roasted salmon)
• recipes learned from bushmen and indigenous peoples (potjiekos, canoe country pancakes, fragrant and intense Gurkha curry)

Woven throughout are colourful stories of Ray’s cooking around the world, from baking a birthday cake using ingredients sourced in the rainforest, to pulling a giant Emu leg drumstick out of a ground oven built by a Pitjantjatjara elder in the Central Australian desert.

Gather round an open fire. Share delicious food inspired by the outdoors and infused with age-old wisdom. This is living. This is the way of the wilderness chef.