How to Spit-Roast Meat over a Camp Fire

Good morning guys, I hope you're all well. It's a beautiful day today. I think it's going to get a bit hot later but for now in the morning it's nice. I thought I'd come out today and show you how I spit roast a chicken or any bird, a game bird, whatever you'd like. It's a technique I've been using a little while. I can't remember where I actually picked it up actually but I find it works quite well so I thought I'd share it with you guys. So I'm going to get this fire started I think I'll do a bit of a log cabin style fire lay today. They're pretty good for getting the fire going and you don't really have to keep checking on it. I've got some birch bark I'm just going to stuff down inside here just to help it catch. Over here I've got some hornbeam. It came down like green about a month ago so I'll use some of this for my spit. You need green wood really because it's got a moisture content and it's not going to burn quickly over the fire. Also when you take the bark off it's quite fresh. There's going to be no insects and things in it. It's going to have less bacteria. So yeah I'm just going to use some of this. Now I'm just going to start to scrape the bark off here. If you've got a sharp spine on your knife you'll be able to get it off pretty easily. Just get off all that bacteria. Now on one end of this I'm going to start to shape it so it's more square. Just nice controlled strokes and a square one edge. Then I'm going to do the opposite side there and just fettle that till you're happy with a bit of a square. Then we've got a guide for our next piece and on our next piece we can use this as a guide to create a channel. So I'm just going to put in the first cut here. With them two cuts done and another down the middle there that's just going to help break these sections out. After a bit of fettling with your knife you should have a nice channel there and your spit end should slot in. A funny angle there. So I might need to shave just a little bit more off that side just so it fits comfortably and then we've got our end. Here I just have a Y stick Y branch just where it forks like that to catch the other end and just put a point on that too. Here we are with our main ingredients. I'm just doing a small bird today because I'm on my own. So I've just got this little Pusan, a young chicken. I've made videos where I've done full-size chickens in this manner as well. So just trim anything off your chicken that you don't want. I'll just go in the fire. Anything that's going to dangle down and just burn. Then we're just going to drizzle on some oil. Rub that in. I've got with me a little spice blend so I'm just going to put that on it. You can just season it if you want. I tend to use my knife and a baton just to make a slit in this spit. There we go. I'm just going to work that just to split it a bit. There we go. Just so it opens up. Okay so here goes. I'm going to thread on the chicken. We're going to get to that point with the slit. I'll take a small twig with the bark taken off and we're going to push that through and it should be able to catch in that gap with the point. You can use your knife to pry it if you want. There we go. Now do that so it goes all the way through. Now the other side like so and that's going to hold your bird steady while it turns so it doesn't slip. Now you've got your legs here and you can truss them in a similar way just using a small twig. We go through one over the spit there and through the other. That's them trussed as well and you can do the same for the wings or you can just tuck them in. I'm going to position my spit in front of the fire here. I can drag the coals around if I want to and using the stick I can gauge where to put the other end about there. There we go. Place that in the slot that in the Y and I've put two potatoes on there kind of as stoppers to stop it going from side to side but also just to go with the chicken. I've never tried this before so that's a bit of an experiment. Always start too high because you can take these out chop them down and lower it or move your fire about but you don't want to go too hot too quick. I'm probably going to start to drag a few of these coals out a bit so they're a bit more directly under and keep the fire going in front of the chicken there which you could do with a little more heat. Starting to get a little bit of colour on now. This system just makes it so easy just to turn it and hold it in place. Manage your coals as you see fit, scraping them in and out depending on the heat and the flame. So here is directly under the chicken at the moment because it's mainly just embers and coals whereas there's some flame at the back. We're ready to take this bird off and to do that we'll use some leather gloves just because it's going to be hot. Just unclip it, bring it over here for a second and look at that. Is that not a thing of beauty? Carefully pull out these and the whole thing should just slide onto the plate. Well I can't wait for it to rest anymore. I don't have a thermometer with me today but you should get a temperature probe to use with big pieces of meat at camp really. But uh yeah I haven't got one. She's looking good. Oh yes. I always find when I cook chicken at camp it's always so juicy. I want some of that crispy skin. Oh and with that spice mix on, lovely. I'll try the potatoes come out. They look pretty good. Yeah they're pretty well cooked actually. Maybe al dente but still nice. Could do with some butter. Gotta try one of these tiny chicken wings. Teeny weeny chicken wing. I do like a wing even if it's tiny. These Pusan chickens are really perfect for like one person at camp. That was cooked through perfectly. I think it took a little over an hour. Start off low and bring that heat up gradually. You don't want to rush anything. You want to make sure it's cooked through any big piece of meat over a campfire. I love this method. It's very controlled. You cook every side of the bird perfectly and there's no slipping or sort of accidents halfway through. It's not the only method but it's the one I prefer. So I hope you learned something and enjoyed that and I'll see you guys on the next one.