Boil ’em, mash ’em, stick em in…clay? Potatoes.

I’m a huge fan of campfire jacket potatoes, but while the aluminium foil you wrap them in is recyclable if rolled into a large enough ball to be collected in recycling plants I’ve been keen to try the historical alternative of covering them in clay ever since I saw it done on the Historical Farm series. There’s a large deposit of clay in a field near the bushcraft school where I teach some courses (which they use for slightly more conventional purposes) so I decided to give it a go.

I hastily dig some clay while all the time looking over my shoulder as the field it comes from is used for police dog training and I didn’t really fancy being taken down by an overzealous Alsatian. I mixed it with enough water to make it mouldable, coated the potatoes to make cannon ball type objects then realised I couldn’t take a photo of the finished object because my hands were covered in clay. These were baked for an hour and a half in the embers at the edge of a campfire.

While this method did work in that the potatoes cooked all the way to the centre, as the clay dried it flaked off in places and the potatoes got burnt. Worse though was the fact that it proved impossible to clean the clay off the skin, forcing you to either eat grit or leave the crispy skin which is in my opinion the best part. To keep the potatoes a bit cleaner, for my next attempt I rubbed the potato with oil and salt and rolled it up in two burdock leaves that I’d washed the most visible slug poo off before coating the whole thing in clay.

This was also baked it for an hour and a half in the embers of a fire that took rather longer than anticipated to get started because it was such a soggy day.

This worked much better with the burdock leaves keeping the skin clean enough to eat. Although it wasn’t quite as crispy as it would have been using foil this method definitely merits further experimentation!