Chuckwagon Beans with Cornbread Lid
Ground beef, two cans of beans, and a cornbread top baked under coals in a Dutch oven.
- calories
- 700
- weight
- 14 oz
- cal / oz
- 50
- protein
- 32 g
- serves
- 6, scales
- prep
- 15 min
- cook
- 50 min
- total time
- 65 min
- water
- 180 ml cold
- cost
- $$
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Dinner
- Dutch oven
- Campfire coals
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- Nut free
- One pot
- Pre-mix at home
- Needs a cooler
- Actual cooking
Ingredients
| Ground beef | 1 lb | brown it at home and freeze it flat in a bag |
|---|---|---|
| Onion | 1 medium, diced | |
| Green bell pepper | 1, diced | |
| Canned baked beans | 2 cans (28 oz total) | |
| Barbecue sauce | 1/3 cup | |
| Chili sauce | 1/2 cup | |
| Worcestershire sauce | 1 tsp | |
| Corn muffin mix | 1 box (8.5 oz) | |
| Powdered milk | 3 tbsp | stands in for the milk the box asks for |
| Egg or powdered egg | 1 | powdered egg keeps the cooler space free |
| Salt and pepper | to taste |
Method
- At home, brown the beef with the onion, pepper, and Worcestershire. Cool it, bag it flat, and freeze it. It thaws in the cooler on the drive.
- In camp, build a fire and let it burn down to coals. You want about 25 briquette-equivalents of heat, most of it on the lid.
- Dump the beef mixture into the Dutch oven with both cans of beans, the barbecue sauce, and the chili sauce. Stir and season.
- Whisk the muffin mix with the powdered milk, egg, and about 180 ml of water. It should be thick, not pourable.
- Spoon the batter over the beans and spread it to the edges. Do not stir it in.
- Set the oven on a bed of coals and shovel more coals onto the lid, roughly twice as many on top as below. Bake 45 to 50 minutes.
- It is done when a stick pushed into the cornbread comes out clean. Longer does no harm; the beans are already cooked.
This is a bean pot with a bread lid, and the lid is the reason it works. Baked beans and barbecue sauce are already sweet and already cooked, so the oven is not really cooking them, it is holding them at a simmer while the cornbread sets on top. That top layer soaks up steam from below and turns into something between cornbread and dumpling.
Browning the beef at home is the real trick. It removes the messiest step from camp, it kills the grease-disposal problem, and a flat frozen bag of cooked beef is a better cooler block than a bag of ice. The powdered milk and powdered egg replace what the muffin box assumes you have in a fridge. Heat from above matters more than heat from below here, so keep most of your coals on the lid or you will get a pale, wet top.
Packing
Beef mixture rides frozen in a doubled freezer bag and does double duty as a cooler block. Muffin mix, powdered milk, and powdered egg go premixed in one bag so camp is one pour and one whisk. Cans and sauce bottles are the heavy part, so this is a drive-in meal.
Variations
- Swap the ground beef for a can of drained black beans and skip the meat entirely. Check the Worcestershire label if that matters to you.
- No cornbread lid: skip the mix and eat the beans over rice or scooped with tortillas.
- A few dashes of hot sauce or a chopped jalapeno in the batter cuts the sweetness of the baked beans.
https://camprecipes.com/classic-recipes/chuckwagon-mmmgood