Introduction: Cook Egg and Bacon in an Orange

About: Hi, I'm Tim. I work on the railways during the day, run a scout troop and have a blog (see above website link) where I discuss my allotment and projects!

This ible is about cooking without pots and pans over an open fire.  Egg and Bacon in Oranges sounds odd and quite frankly, it's an aquired taste.

Actually in my opinion it tastes horrible, but the scouts enjoy doing it and even enjoy eating them.

You need:

- Orange
- Egg
- Bacon
- A well built fire.

Don't get too hung up about not being able to find oranges in the wild in Britain, but it's about getting kids to think outside the box.

Step 1: Preparing the Orange

You need to slice off the top of the orange - same sort of height you might do a boiled egg.  Refer to the photos to see the sort of 'cap' you are trying to create.

The most difficult bit of the procedure is to remove the contents of the orange (eat it, it's tasty and healthy btw)

At the end, the cap should still sit on the top of the orange.

Step 2: Line It With Bacon

I used streaky bacon, however back bacon or similar is fine.  Just wrap it round inside - or drape it in so it covers all the inside of the orange.

Step 3: Add Egg


Step 4: Fixing the Lid

I used toothpicks to secure the lids - but true backwoods style would probably use small sharpened green sticks.

It's a good idea to soak the toothpicks because otherwise they'll just burn away.

Step 5: Stick It on the Fire

Cooking on fires isn't straightforward, you need to understand the difference between embers and flames.

Embers have very little or absolutely no flame but glow red hot especially when blown on.  If you're used to using BBQ's, that's what we're talking about.  Flames are much less hotter & just blacken the food with soot.

Embers is what we want.  When the egg swells and pushes the lid up, the food is cooked.

Step 6: Edible

The cooked egg is pretty much hard boiled and the bacon is getting a bit crispy.  A success.

Shame it all tastes faintly of orange really, but edible.

Step 7: Taking It Further

Other thick peeled fruit works quite well too.  We've used bananas to cook sausages.  Because we had to open the banana up to check the sausage (and finding it uncooked) we had to re-wrap it and cheated with a bit of tin foil...

You can also unsuprisingly cook a banana in banana skin - making a slit in them stuff them with hot chocolate powder or chocolate buttons.  Mmm, tasty.

Wrap onions in tin foil with sausages on top and they'll steam them and of course you get onions cooked in sausage fat.