12 Unique Approaches to Cooking With Fire

We associate a lot of flavors with summertime: juicy watermelon, sun-warmed peaches, and popsicles that you eat before they melt down your hand. But when it comes to summer camp, there are few flavors more iconic than roasting weenies or toasting marshmallows over a campfire.

Cooking with fire is an ancient tradition that dates back to the Paleolithic era. Long before sausages or marshmallows had even been invented, humans were skewering their food and putting it over an open flame to cook. Over the millennia, the art of fire cooking has evolved quite a bit. We’ve learned how to cure with smoke, and how to harness volcanic heat to make everything from potatoes to pizza.

Here are a few of our favorite places and foods that put a unique spin on cooking with fire, from a mountain in Turkey that provides open flames for toasting marshmallows to a Māori cooking method that relies on a pit of fire.