Hunter's First Night Pasta Pot
Ground beef, three kinds of tomato, and elbow macaroni. The meal you eat the night you drive in.
- calories
- 620
- weight
- 11 oz
- cal / oz
- 56
- protein
- 32 g
- serves
- 6, scales
- prep
- 15 min
- cook
- 40 min
- total time
- 55 min
- water
- 250 ml boiled
- cost
- $$
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Dinner
- Campfire coals
- Liquid fuel
- Grill grate
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- One pot
- Pre-mix at home
- Needs a cooler
- Basic
Ingredients
| Elbow macaroni | 1 lb | boiled at home the night before, tossed with oil |
|---|---|---|
| Ground chuck | 1 lb | 80/20; frozen solid, it doubles as a cooler ice block |
| Canned tomato sauce | 1 can (15 oz) | |
| Canned tomato puree | 1 can (15 oz) | |
| Canned tomato paste | 1 small can (6 oz) | |
| Green bell pepper | 1, diced at home | |
| Yellow onion | 1 large, diced at home | |
| Garlic | 1 clove, minced | |
| Grated parmesan | 1/2 cup | the shelf-stable shaker kind |
Method
- Set a deep pot or a big skillet over the fire on a grate, or on a wide liquid-fuel burner. You want steady medium heat, not flame.
- Brown the ground chuck, breaking it apart as it goes. Pour off the grease into a can or jar to pack out. Do not dump it in camp.
- Add the onion, pepper, and garlic and cook until the onion turns soft, about five minutes.
- Stir in the tomato sauce, puree, and paste. Add about 250 ml of water to loosen it and to rinse the cans out.
- Simmer 30 minutes, stirring now and then so the paste does not catch on the bottom. Pull the pot off direct flame if it starts spitting.
- Fold in the cooked pasta and heat it through, five minutes.
- Shake parmesan over each bowl.
This is a first-night meal and it is built like one. The pasta is boiled at home, so at camp you are running one pot and one long simmer instead of juggling two burners and a colander in the dark. Frozen ground chuck rides in the cooler as a block of ice that turns into dinner.
Three tomato products sounds like overkill, but each does a different job: sauce for volume, puree for body, paste for the concentrated flavor that a 30-minute camp simmer would not otherwise build. Keep it off direct flame while it reduces, or the paste scorches to the pot and you taste it in every bowl. It does not pack down for backpacking, and it does not want to.
Packing
Cook the pasta at home, drain, toss with a little oil so it does not glue together, and pack it in a zip bag in the cooler. Dice the onion and pepper at home too and bag them together. The beef goes in frozen. Cans and the parmesan shaker ride in the dry bin.
Variations
- Swap the ground chuck for two pouches of shelf-stable cooked taco beef if you have no cooler.
- A can of kidney beans stretches it to eight people and adds nothing to the cook time.
- Chili flake and dried oregano stirred in at the simmer step do a lot for very little weight.
https://camprecipes.com/classic-recipes/hunters-first-night-bum-stew