More than s’mores: These campers are bringing their hot pot and chicken tikka to the great outdoors | Canada Voices

Camping used to hold no appeal for Jerry Yang.

He immigrated to Canada as a child and grew up with stories of his parents’ impoverished upbringing in rural China: They had no running water and built fires to keep warm and cook food. When he learned his privileged white Canadian peers did this electively in the summer, he dismissed it as “poverty cosplay.”

But in 2022, his partner at the time was determined to overturn Yang’s beliefs – and he knew the perfect way to do it. He trilled on about how the best part of camping was the food, how meals were much tastier when prepared outdoors. Yang, who loves cooking, was intrigued.

In the four years since then, Yang, who lives in Vancouver, has been on many such trips and established himself as the resident camping chef in his friend group. He’s grilled Korean galbi on a portable BBQ and slowly braised a star anise- and cinnamon-spiced beef curry over a fire for seven hours.

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The pièce de résistance of a trip last summer was a bountiful Chinese hot pot with beef, fish balls, tofu, vegetables and noodles. He brought Asian condiments including soy sauce, chili oil and Kewpie mayo to add to the hot pot, and used them the next day to whip up a sauce for grilled chicken wings.

Yang is one of the many racialized Canadians who have been converted into a camper in recent years – a steadily growing demographic. In 2019, racialized Canadians made up 24 per cent of campers, but in 2025, that figure had increased to 37 per cent, according to an annual survey conducted by Kampgrounds of America, a network of campgrounds that spans North America. The rate was highest among Asians, who made up 18 per cent of the total camping population last year, compared with 11 per cent in 2019.

In 2011, Parks Canada launched the Learn-to Camp program, designed in part to introduce many groups – including new Canadians and racialized populations – to camping. The program teaches participants the basics, such as how to pitch a tent and set up a fire, and has since reached more than 725,000 people.

A big part of that learning process for first-and second-generation immigrants has been the discovery that, with some creativity and the right equipment, they can prepare their beloved pav bhaji, dosa and adobo and rice away from home. And because of the extra flavour that comes from cooking over an open fire and how satisfying a meal can be right after a long hike, those dishes often taste better when they’re made in the wilderness.

What Canadians have long thought of as camping food – hot dogs, s’mores and foil-wrapped packets of potatoes and sausage – were popularized by the Scouting movement. Their ingredients were fairly easy to store and could be made over a fire without the need for any extra appliances; simplicity and efficiency took precedence over taste.

But the way we camp has evolved, and so it makes sense that our food has, too. A $500 Yeti cooler can keep your perishables cold for several days. Portable stoves, grills and battery-powered small appliances allow you to blend, sauté and braise things the way you would at home.

And so when Hala Chaudhry’s family goes camping, they bring supplies to transform group campsites in Ontario provincial parks into South Asian banquet halls.

The crew of 50 doesn’t travel light. Instead of small cans of butane, they hook up their camp stoves to nine-kilogram propane cylinders. On a trip last year, that meant they had enough fuel to fry up 50 parathas in the morning, make masala fish fry from freshly-caught bass and pike for lunch, and slow-cook two giant vats of mutton karahi – containing 35 pounds of meat – for dinner. Their prep arsenal contains cutting boards, knives and battery-operated miniature food processors.

In the more than 15 years that Chaudhry’s family has been doing the trip, the group has grown from two families to 16, and they’ve perfected their routine. To keep the 65 pounds of meat, 80 eggs and huge volume of yogurt and milk from spoiling on last summer’s excursion, they made giant ice blocks in Tupperware and Tetrised them around perishables in their coolers.

“Think of what Drake did,” the Toronto-based Chaudhry says, referring to the sculpture of 3,500 ice blocks built as a stunt to promote the rapper’s Iceman album earlier this year. “It literally lasted, like, a week.”

As with all great event planning, there are multiple spreadsheets, Google Docs and e-mails involved in the six-month buildup to the annual camping trip. There are grocery lists, job assignments and a calculation of what each family must contribute financially. There’s also a detailed schedule, including times for cooking, eating and washing dishes to make sure things run smoothly on the trip.

Jobs are assigned based on everyone’s strengths. There are a few uncles who make a killer chicken karahi, an aunt whose chana masala is beloved, and some – like Chaudhry – who are put to work washing dishes in an assembly line.

But all that effort and planning is worthwhile, Chaudhry says, and she looks forward to these meals all year.

“You will never catch me eating hot dogs on a family camping trip – it’s chana masala or nothing.”

But recreating the comforts of a suburban kitchen in the woods isn’t a draw for everyone.

The idea of “taking everything from home just to live in the woods” was what initially deterred Megha Arora from camping.

“I hated the idea,” said Arora, who arrived in Canada two-and-a-half years ago from New Delhi. “But then when I went there, oh my god. I was like: ‘This is it. I think I’ve found my thing. I found an activity I can do every summer.’”

The Ottawa resident now goes on an average of half a dozen camping trips each summer, sometimes just with her husband, but often with a group of friends. She’s figured out shortcuts to cooking in the woods, such as boiling chickpeas and chopping vegetables at home and putting them in the cooler. Doing that prep helps to speed up the process of making matar kulcha – a pea or chickpea curry served with flatbread – when she’s at the campsite.

To her, it’s a meal much simpler than a lot of traditional Canadian camping foods, such as burgers, which she made on a previous trip and deemed more trouble than they were worth.

“Oh my God, there’s so much to carry, there’s so much to do, chopping and this and that,” she said. “I have to now bring patties, buns, coleslaw or tomato and onions, condiments.”

Mehwish Khan knows those Canadian camping staples well from her family’s involvement with Scouts Canada. But she’s learned there are far tastier things to cook that her five kids still enjoy eating.

Instead of classic salt-and-pepper seasoned beef burgers, she’ll make seekh kabob, skewers of minced meat mixed with cumin, coriander and ginger from her native Pakistan. And instead of brushing bottled Diana Sauce onto chicken thighs on the barbecue, she marinates them at home in a tikka spice blend, freezes them, and then defrosts and grills them over charcoal.

The prep work isn’t much. On a weeknight ahead of the trip, if she’s frying onions and making a masala for a lentil or chicken dish for dinner at home in Milton, Ont., she’ll just double it and pack half into a Ziploc bag, freezing it flat so it’s easy to stack into the cooler. At the campsite, it’s quick work to then add protein or fresh vegetables and have a meal ready in 15 minutes, rather than the hour it might take at home.

The meat and other items that would be quick to perish are stored in a designated cooler, and each day someone goes to the camp store to buy fresh ice for it. This makes four- or even five-day trips doable without any food spoiling. Instead of packing her whole spice cabinet, Khan brings little boxes of Shan spice mixes.

She learned the hard way to break meat down into smaller pieces and individually freeze them before packing them for trips. Once, a mutton leg she had marinated at home, frozen and brought to the camp to cook was not taken out to thaw, and when it came time to prepare it, it was still frozen rock-solid.

Caroline D’Souza’s family no longer troubles themselves with cooking on their first night of camping. Now, on their drive to the campsite, they stop at a restaurant in Scarborough to pick up a big tray of biryani to have for dinner.

They reheat it on a portable camping stove, the bottom layer of rice turning crispy like a Persian tahdig or socarrat in a Spanish paella. It’s infinitely tastier this way than it is when plated at home, D’Souza says, and even her friends who aren’t Indian have come to expect it as the first-night meal when camping with her.

On family trips, their preferred trail mix is bhel puri, a popular Indian street food made with puffed rice, diced onions, tomatoes, cilantro, green chillies, lemon juice and spices.

D’Souza knows that food from “back home” is what convinced some of the older members of her family to join on the trips, such as her late grandmother, who camped with the family well into her 90s.

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The care and effort put into preparing and cooking these meals can also make the rougher, unpredictable parts of camping more tolerable.

On the second night of a trip last summer, Yang – the former camping skeptic – and his group returned from a hike to see that a storm had wreaked havoc on their campsite. Everything had been blown around and later, their tent flooded.

In any other circumstance, Yang believes his crew would’ve just admitted defeat, packed everything up and driven home early. But he had promised them fried rice, steak and chicken tacos for dinner, so Yang sat under an umbrella under a small shelter and cooked. At the end of the night, he and his pals slept in their cars with full bellies.

“Part of staying was because of the food – everyone wanted to eat it,” he says.