How to Make Pizza on Your Next Camping Trip

Ah, pizza—an easy contender for the frontrunner slot when it comes to the most-craved camping meals. That mean craving is enough to compel car campers to beeline for the nearest pizza parlor at the drop of a hat—and to drive more than a few backpackers with even only a few days of hoofing it under their belt a wee bit crazy.

Well, believe it or not, it’s never been easier to satisfy that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-style desire for a slice (or five) of pizza while camping. Let’s break down a few different ways of whipping up a knockout campfire pizza pie, but also—and we’re super-excited about this—introduce a brand-new Mountain House product you’re most definitely going to want to get your hands on: our Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl!

Why Pizza is the Perfect Camping Meal

It’s not the easiest stat to lock down, but studies suggest that pizza may just be the most all-around popular food in the world. It’s definitely one of those meals that seems to hold equal appeal regardless of your age—the sort of culinary preference many of us never grow out of.

And why should we? Pizza is an insanely versatile food, embodying a lot of noble culinary traditions (most notably, arguably, Italian and American) but also wildly customizable and open to full-on creative tinkering.

When it comes to camping food, pizza checks a lot of boxes—providing essential calcium, carbohydrates, potassium, and a crave-worthy mix of flavors that always hits the spot after a full day outdoors.

As it happens, pizza doesn’t have to be a treat only enjoyed on the drive home from your camping trip: You’ve got multiple ways of bringing this über-beloved dish into the great outdoors. And now there’s a new means, thanks to the Mountain House team and our super-portable, super-convenient freeze-dried spin on pizza.

How to Cook Pizza While Camping

Mind you, there’s nothing stopping you from packing takeout from your go-to pizza joint into the campsite and heating it up over the fire or the cookstove. (We’re all for it, in fact.) But that’s a limited option. How do you whip up the fresh stuff in the campground—or way out along that BLM backroad or in that wilderness campsite?

Let’s consider a few campfire pizza recipes to kick things off...

Campfire Pizza Using Cast Iron or Pizza Stone

If you’ve got the capacity to tote a cast-iron pan/skillet or a pizza stone on your camping getaway, you can absolutely get your pizza game going at the campsite. It’ll require packing in pre-made pizza dough of some kind: store-bought or homemade.

Here’s how:

1. Get your campfire going and build up a nice coal bed.

2. Preheat your skillet or stone over the hot coals.

3. Spread your preferred sauce, cheese, and toppings—pepperoni, sausage, veggies, etc.—over the dough.

4. Cook until the crust is golden brown and the cheese is entirely melted.

Dutch Oven Pizza

If your tastes run more toward a thicker crust, a Dutch-oven pizza—again, prepared with premade dough and whatever your toppings of choice—is a good way to go. A campfire-style Dutch oven has legs and a rimmed lid that allows you to place coals both under and on top of the cast-iron vessel.

Layering parchment paper beneath your pizza dough inside the Dutch oven can help prevent sticking. Preheat the Dutch oven with coals underneath or by ringing it. When cooking your pizza, you’ll generally want to aim for more coals atop the lid than underneath the base to avoid overcooking.

Quicker Alternatives

A quicker route to a campfire pizza is going with some kind of bread base instead of pizza dough: Everything from French bread and rolls to naan/flatbread and pita can work. Layer with sauce, cheese, and toppings, then heat up on a grill, skillet, or camp stove until the cheese is fully melted and the bread is getting crispy.

If you want minimal fuss/cleanup, you can go the foil-packet route, again using French bread, flatbread, or the like, saucing and cheesing and topping it up, and loosely wrapping it in aluminum foil. Place this packet directly on your campfire coals, and you’ll have a ready-made rendition of pizza pockets in short order!

But here’s the deal: There’s an even easier, even quicker—and equally delicious—way to satisfy that campout pizza craving, thanks to our team here at Mountain House. Drumroll, please...

Introducing Mountain House’s Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl

How about a camping-friendly pizza mimicking straight-from-the-oven flavors that you can get going within minutes—and with just-add-water convenience?

That’s the magic of our new Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl, which employs our patented Mountain House process to produce the first pizza-inspired meal in the freeze-dried category. We’re thinking this is going to majorly revolutionize campsite dining!

Why are campers going to love it? Well, the Mountain House Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl hits all of the flavors of oven-baked pizza courtesy of its buttermilk-biscuit pizza crust, melty cheese, pepperoni, and herb-rich sauce, and yet it’s ready to eat in less than 10 minutes without the need for bulky equipment—or even a campfire (though it’s mighty nice to enjoy this freeze-dried pizza wonder beside one!).

At Mountain House, we’ve been an industry leader in outdoor cuisine and freeze-dried technology since the 1960s and have always been keen on building upon our firm, time-tested foundation with bold new products. Now our trusted brand is giving you the option to take pizza everywhere—from the RV campground and vanlife boondocking grounds to the deep backcountry.

How the Pizza Bowl Compares to Traditional Campfire Pizza

• Convenience: Our Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl is an all-in-one sort of product. You don’t need to bring along separate ingredients or equipment, beyond a pot to boil water in. You don’t need to wait around for dough to rise or make sure your cooking surfaces are properly balanced and preheated. Easier to prepare than the alternatives—with a quick prep time— but just as lip-smackingly good, our Pizza Bowl also boasts a vastly longer shelf life than regular pizza thanks to our Mountain House 30-year taste guarantee.

• Portability: Featherweight and supremely packable, our Pizza Bowl pouches are a lifesaver on both camping and backpacking trips. The ability to produce a delicious, thoughtfully made pizza meal while adding barely any bulk to your camping supplies is kind of a game-changer, if you ask us.

• Taste & Nutrition: As with all of the varied, chef-driven recipes we use here at Mountain House, we source the highest-quality, most flavorful ingredients for our Pizza Bowl—and our proprietary freeze-dried process preserves the nutrition, taste, texture, and mouthfeel of these ingredients to an impressive degree. Founded on a savory blend of pepperoni, mozzarella cheese, and classic pizza sauce, this brand-new product delivers a perfectly satisfying, high-energy, crazy-tasty meal after a day spent hiking, paddling, fishing, hunting, climbing, or otherwise doing your thing out in Mother Nature.

Real Insights From Mountain House R&D

Why did we tackle such an iconic food as pizza for our newest freeze-dried challenge? Well, because our Mountain House research-and-development team responds attentively to the consumer feedback we solicit as to what our customers want to chow down on out there. And—surprise, surprise—pizza consistently lands high on the list.

Producing a new offering such as this is also something we love doing because it helps us explore new techniques and refine our own approach with regard to capturing the very best flavors and textures. “Coming up with what works for the consumer is a fun process,” as Drew Heubsch, our hard-working R&D director, puts it. And after the kind of always-illuminating trial-and-error testing that goes into this sort of thing, the goal became what essentially is (in Drew’s words) “a deconstructed pizza.”

Through this R&D process, we honed in on a cheesy pepperoni focus for our pizza recipe, given its broad, crowd-pleasing appeal. A whole lot of meticulous refinement went into hitting the bull’s eye in terms of evoking such pizza essentials as a crunchy crust and first-rate, forkable “cheese stretch.”

We think you’re going to absolutely love the result and can’t wait to hear what you think!

Take Our Pizza Bowl on Your Next Camping Trip

You don’t have to sit around the campsite or trudge down the trail merely fantasizing about pizza—pizza while camping can be a beautiful, mouthwatering, soul-satisfying reality! Alongside campsite favorites like skillet, Dutch oven, and foil-packet pizzas, you now have an even easier, low-hassle option that requires minimal equipment—our Cheesy Pepperoni Pizza Bowl, the latest in a long line of Mountain House innovations transforming outdoor dining.

And don’t forget all of our other beloved freeze-dried camping and backpacking foods when planning your roughing-it meal plan!