The Stew Doesn’t Need a Fire: One Pot, Outdoors
One Pot, Outdoors
Marcus spends most weekends somewhere without walls. Stews are what he makes best, and he’d rather make them outside — where there’s no fire.
TET Product Team · 7 min read
Marcus likes cooking outdoors, and he likes sharing how he does it — stews above all.
I like cooking outdoors
Most weekends it’s the same setup: a folding chair, a cast-iron pot, and a drive that ends where the pavement does. I don’t do it because it’s easy. I do it because it’s outside.
This isn’t my job. It’s a habit.
I put the pot on before it gets dark. I listen to it come up, watch the colour turn from red to deep brown, and then sit down in a folding chair with a bowl in my hands once the light is gone. I’ve done that a lot of times. Friends ask me the same question every single time: why not just cook at home?
The hard parts of camp cooking were never the cooking
I’ll say it first: cooking outdoors is a hassle.
Heat you have to babysit — wind pushes a flame around and you end up crouched next to it, adjusting.
Fuel you have to count — is one canister enough, do I bring a spare, where do I refill it.
One burner does one thing — while the stew is on, nothing else gets warm.
Cleanup is a second job — the ring of black on the bottom of the pot takes twenty minutes to get off at home.
And the two worst ones: in a dry season, fires get banned. And the moment you look down at the pot, you’ve missed the view you came for.
The hard parts of camp cooking have never been the cooking. What I wanted was never a better kitchen. It was one good meal — by the treeline, by the river, with no walls anywhere — without being held down by all of it.
The stew: red wine and tomato braised beef
The one I make most is a red wine and tomato braise with beef chuck. It is not a difficult dish. It is a slow one, which is the whole reason it suits a day outdoors.
Serves 4–6 · Hands-on 25 minutes · Total 2½ to 3 hours
Ingredients
· 1.5 kg (3¼ lb) beef chuck, cut into 4 cm (1½ in) cubes
· Salt and freshly ground black pepper
· 2 tbsp olive oil
· 2 onions, roughly diced
· 2 carrots, in thick rounds
· 6 garlic cloves, smashed
· 2 tbsp tomato paste
· 500 ml (2 cups) dry red wine
· 400 g (14 oz) can whole peeled tomatoes, with their juice
· 500 ml (2 cups) beef stock or water
· 2 bay leaves, 3–4 sprigs of thyme
· To finish: salt, a pinch of sugar if the tomatoes are sharp, a small knob of cold butter
Method
1. Salt the meat 40 minutes ahead — the night before is better — and pat it dry just before it goes in. This is what decides the colour.
2. Sear it. Heavy cast-iron pot on the induction zone at full power. Once the oil is hot, add the meat in two batches and leave each side 2–3 minutes until it is properly dark before turning. Set it all aside. About 8 minutes.
3. Build the base. Onions and carrots into the same pot, 5 minutes until soft. Garlic and tomato paste, one more minute — cook the paste until it darkens.
4. Deglaze. Red wine in, scrape the brown off the bottom of the pot, reduce by half, 6–8 minutes.
5. Put it together. Beef back in with its juices, then the tomatoes, the stock and the herbs. The liquid should just barely cover the meat — more and it tastes thin, less and it dries out.
6. Drop to a bare simmer. Turn the induction zone down to whatever holds small bubbles coming up slowly (about 95°C / 200°F), lid on with a gap, 1.5–2 hours. Stir once.
7. Reduce. Last 20 minutes with the lid off, until the sauce coats the back of a spoon. Off the heat, swirl in a small knob of cold butter.
8. Rest it 10 minutes before it goes on the table. This is the step people skip, and the one that changes the plate.
If you make it
Tell me how it turned out and what you changed — the version in my notebook is not the only one.
A pot of stew is a lot of food for one person
Here’s the part I didn’t think about when I started cooking out there: a braise for four is a braise for four. You can’t really make less of it. The pot doesn’t work that way.
So most of the time I’m feeding whoever is around. Someone at the next site comes over to ask what that smell is. Somebody’s kid takes a bowl and comes back for a second one. I end up writing the method out by hand on the back of a receipt, or saying it out loud to three people at once, and I have never once minded that.
Most of what I know about cooking outdoors came out of somebody else’s pot — a man fishing at a lake who showed me how he kept beans warm on the side, a couple living in a van who traded me bread for stew. Cooking outdoors is the only kind of cooking where the audience gets fed.
Then I switched to a stove with no fire in it
Later on I started cooking on one that doesn’t burn anything — TET’s Portable Power Cooking Station, the two-zone model.
The first thing that changed: a simmer stopped being a skill and became a setting.
Holding a bare simmer used to depend on feel and luck. Wind, air temperature, how much fuel was left — all of it moved the number. Now it’s a position on the panel. Turn it there, put the lid on, crack it open, and it stays there. I can walk down to the river for twenty minutes and come back to the same small bubbles coming up one at a time.
The second thing: two zones at once. The induction zone on the left holds the stew — 1500W, and it suits a heavy pot. The infrared zone on the right does the sides — 800W, gentler, better for toasting and for holding something warm. With a single burner, putting the stew on meant stopping everything else. Now the two lines run together and finish together, which is the first time I’ve had a whole table land at once outdoors.
The third one is plain: no fuel. Nothing to count, nothing to carry, nothing to run out of. I charge it in the garage before I leave.
Stew on one side, sides on the other
The stew owns the left zone for two hours, so the right one shouldn’t sit idle. Three things I do there, and none of them needs watching:
Garlic bread — olive oil, garlic, a little parsley, brushed on, two or three minutes a side until the edges catch.
A pot of rice — heavy small pot, bring it up, drop to the lowest setting and leave the lid on.
A pot of soup or beans — just let it hold warm and bring it out with the stew.
Five things I’ve learned about braising outdoors
1. Sear first, don’t skip it. Those few minutes of browning decide the depth of the whole pot, and no amount of simmering brings it back.
2. Keep the liquid just level with the meat. More and you’ll be reducing for an hour; less and the meat goes dry.
3. A simmer is enough — don’t let it boil. Two hours at a rolling boil gives you shredded meat and cloudy liquid.
4. Salt in two passes. On the meat before it goes in, in the sauce before it comes off.
5. Budget for the rest. Ten minutes off the heat before you touch it — the meat needs that time to pull the liquid back in, and outdoors you’re not in a hurry anyway.
Why I still cook outdoors
People ask why I don’t just make it at home and carry it out.
Because the dish only turns out right when it’s made out there.
I still eat most of my meals outside when the weather allows. The pot goes on before dark either way. The only thing that changed is that I stopped negotiating with a fire to make it happen.
When the lid comes off and the steam hits you, it carries pine needles and cold river air and somebody’s dog barking in the distance. None of that goes into the food, but all of it goes into the meal. The hassle of cooking outdoors is real. So is the part that has no name. I used to trade one for the other.