The art of wilderness cooking highlights ingredients from Oregon's public lands
Kayla Sulak grew up cooking, but it wasn’t until she started spending most of her time outdoors that she became a wilderness chef.
To save money for gas and outdoor adventures — and to just eat better food — she turned to Oregon’s public lands for ingredients such as wild mushrooms, fish and game that she cooks over a camp stove or campfire and showcases on social media.
Sulak, who lives out of her truck and is based in Sisters, specializes in one-pan meals that can include everything from morels to rabbit, chanterelles to smallmouth bass, trout to grouse, all spiced and served up in different ways. She displays her camp cooking recipes and creations on YouTube and at @her.campkitchen on Instagram.
“When you’re harvesting something straight from nature, cleaning it and cooking it, I feel a strong need to honor our fish, game or what we foraged by making it into something memorable,” she said.
Sulak joined a recent edition of the Explore Oregon Podcast to talk about all things culinary in Oregon’s outdoors. Along with boyfriend Mason Krupka, an experienced hunter and angler, they talked about how they forage mushrooms, catch fish and hunt game. Then, they talked about the most flavorful ways to cook it up and their favorite recipes.
Here’s a few highlights from the conversation, including a few of the recipes Sulak discussed. For a lot more conversation about hunting mushrooms, catching fish and additional recipes, listen to the entire podcast at StatesmanJournal.com/explore.
Zach Urness: I’ve seen you cook over campfires and on a camp stove. Do you have a favorite heat source for cooking?
Kayla Sulak: The camp stove really is more simple, whereas with campfire cooking, you have to get your coal heat just right when you're cooking — I don’t cook over open flames. So there is like a whole strategy to the campfire cooking and it’s fun and you can save money on gas, but for simplicity, I’d go with a camp stove.
Urness: Do you have a favorite combination of simple spices and oils that you always try to have on hand?
Sulak: Our most common things are pretty basic, like salt, pepper, garlic. We use a lot of paprika. Smoked paprika seems to appear quite a bit and then white wine. With mushrooms, butter is better so that’s what we normally use, whereas with trout, I really prefer to use bacon fat actually. So we use a lot of bacon fat, a lot of butter, and then I always have like just basic vegetable oil around to have something neutral for frying.
Urness: I know that you cook a ton of recipes with Pacific Golden chanterelles, so what’s your favorite so far?
Sulak: My favorite recipe so far, and we've cooked a lot of things with chanterelles, is called Hungarian mushroom soup. It's basically like a cream of mushroom soup, but it has some lemon, paprika, white wine and cream. And that just really showcases the chanterelle flavor. I don't like to overpower chanterelles because they have kind of the subtle flavor, and if you bury it in a bunch of strong spices or a really rich sauce, you're not going to taste them. This recipe kind of has a lot of flavors going on and you still can taste them. There’s a lot of recipes for it out there but the one I like is from themodernproper.com.
Urness: When you cut up your chanterelle, how small do you get them? Do you have big strips of the mushroom? Do you get them pretty small? How do you handle that?
Sulak: It depends. For something like soup, I would probably go small, for this Hungarian mushroom soup, I think some people like to even take an immersion blender or some like a food processor and blend it into a full creamy soup. But we don't have that kind of stuff in the woods. So it's like if, if I want it to be, um, kind of creamy without blending it, I'm gonna chop it up into small pieces. If I'm just frying the mushrooms and putting 'em on a steak, I might go bigger, just like a rough chop.
Urness: What about cooking up trout? They have like a little bit of a so-so reputation. Have you been able to find ways to make it tasty and interesting?
Sulak: Yeah. We've cooked so much trout now we do get a little tired of it. There are a few things that we do and one of them is smoking it out in the woods. We do like a little rock chimney thing and get like hardwood chips or pellets or whatever and we like smoking it with a brown sugar brine because it's almost like candied trout when it’s done smoking. I would say aside from that, my favorite recipe so far is to put it in fish curry. I also just love curry and Asian recipes, so fish curry is the way to go with trout aside from smoking.
Urness: When you say a fish curry, is it easy to throw that into Google and come up with some pretty good stuff? Do you have some favorite kind of curry or what specifically makes it good?
Sulak: I do have a favorite recipe. It's on IndianHealthyRecipes.com. It’s got a fish curry recipe on there that's got a little bit of coconut milk. It's a red curry, a lot of spices and butter and everything. It adds a wow factor to trout since we are a little tired of eating it.
Urness: Well for us more basic folks, like, you know, those like me who go backpacking, catch the fish and are like, ‘OK what now?’ What have you found is just the simplest, most user-friendly, easy way to make them at least kind of good? Is there one real simple way you like best?
Sulak: I would say if you just fry it with butter and then make a little pan sauce where you're frying it with a little butter, lemon, white wine and salt, just kind of whip all that in the pan. Super basic, and it tastes almost gourmet like you feel fancy, especially on a backpacking trip.
Urness: What are the rules on hunting rabbits and how do you normally do it?
Mason Krupka: Rabbits are unregulated in Oregon — there's no season or no bag limit (a license is required to hunt them). It’s a lot of walking. I usually am using a 12 gauge, sometimes a 22 and yeah, for rabbits, because we don't have a dog, which kind of makes it a little bit more challenging, you just have to put in miles and they're really fast so when you see 'em, you might only have a second to shoot at 'em or something, so you're going have a lot of failure in there. But when success does come, it starts becoming a really fun way of hunting. We usually put in like 7 to 10 miles if we're like really setting out to for sure get a rabbit. Yeah, it's a lot.
Urness: So once you get the rabbits, in my mind they don't have a ton of meat, but am I wrong there?
Sulak: They do have actually quite a bit of meat. Like, we haven't really weighed how much meat is on the average rabbit, but I wanna say there's, on average, without the bones at least, maybe three quarters of a pound or something. They do have quite a bit of meat on them.
Urness: What’s your favorite recipe?
Sulak: My favorite recipe that we've tried so far is from the famous Jacques Pépin — the French chef. He has a recipe for rabbit braised with morels and pearl onions. The legs get stewed in a broth with the morels and the onions but then the back strap gets cooked separately with herbs, the provence and like some other stuff. So the back strap gets cooked separately from the legs. It is kind of a complex recipe, so I'm sure some people look at that and be like, ‘That's way too hard to do in the woods.' But it’s a delicious, delicious recipe.
Urness: What sticks out about rabbit meats? How would you describe rabbit, as far as how it tastes?
Sulak: Not to be cliche, but it, I really think it tastes like chicken. It's a very light with a wild taste. It's a little more flavorful than chicken. We brine pretty much all of our wild meat and rabbits really benefit from like brine in a salt water solution overnight before you cook it. It helps wash out that kind of gamey taste.
Krupka: And that's the cotton tail she's talking about. The jackrabbit is much more like a venison flavor.
Urness: How would you compare wild game to what you’re getting in the grocery store? Is there a more distinct flavor?
Sulak: One thing that’s interesting is that all the wild meat is a little different. You might get quail in one place and then get quail somewhere else, and depending on like what they're eating and where they're living, they'll taste different. And then each bird has its own kind of thing going on, whether it's light meat or dark meat and what it tastes like. It’s just a lot more variety than what you see in grocery stores.
Zach Urness has been an outdoors reporter in Oregon for 15 years and is host of the Explore Oregon Podcast. To support his work, subscribe to the Statesman Journal. Urness is the author of “Best Hikes with Kids: Oregon” and “Hiking Southern Oregon.” He can be reached at zurness@StatesmanJournal.com or 503-399-6801. Find him on Twitter at @ZachsORoutdoors.
This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Wilderness cooking with ingredients from Oregon public lands
