These hot little packets of flaky dough are a favorite for everyone. Kids will eat anything wrapped in bread, and you can stuff them with a variety of flavors. They are delicious fresh, but they’re also excellent the next day for your lunch break or reheat them in the coals on your camping trip. Bear Bombs are a shoo-in crowd pleaser.
Easy Bread
The bread is simply canned biscuits from the grocery store. Just pop them open and use your fingers to spread them wide into a circle. Add a spoonful or two of your filling, then pull the edges up and twist them to help them stay in place. The dough is very stretchy, so you can fill them pretty full.
Tasty Fillings
Fillings can be anything, and it’s an easy way to use up leftovers. My family first fell in love with these when we used leftover pulled bear meat with cheese for the filling. That’s why it’s called a bear bomb, but any wild meat goes over well. These pictured were stuffed with deer sausage, scrambled eggs, and cheese.
Pizza flavors are a sure-fire hit.
Try using leftover turkey and a little ham with swiss cheese for a chicken cordon bleu flavor.
Pulled meat with a little bbq sauce would be nice.
Pack some pulled meat with a little rice and black beans and queso fresco with a squeeze of lime.
The key thing: Don’t use too much additional sauce. If there’s too much moisture inside, the biscuit crust doesn’t bake as well.
You can bake them in the oven, in a toaster oven, in a Dutch oven, on sticks over the fire, or in the coals. If you put them on roasting sticks, consider leaving the dough a little thicker under the filling. You can wrap them in foil and put them in the coals, but you can also place them directly into the fire or maybe sit them on a rock. They’ll get a nice dark and crispy outer layer like brick oven pizza. Use tongs to rotate them for even cooking.
What You Need
- Biscuit dough, like Pilsbury; buy the extra large size for a larger serving
- Filling, as discussed above. I used 8 eggs and scrambled them with a pound of deer sausage and a heaping cup of shredded cheese. Cheese is always good in bear bombs.
- ***The filling will not cook significantly, so you should pre-cook any raw ingredients. Definitely don’t use raw bear meat as a filling.***
What You Do
Prepare the filling if it needs cooking. Preheat the oven to 350°F, or get a fire going so you’ll have a pile of coals. It’s good to stuff the bombs with warm filling to them cook better. Pop open the biscuits and use your fingers to spread until they are about the size of your palm. Spoon filling onto the dough in your hand, not too much, but you might be surprised at how much you can pack in.
With the filling on the dough, use your fingers to pull the edges up over the filling. I like to do it around the circle because it looks nice in the end. Start at six o’clock and pull up the edge, then pull up the dough from about four o’clock and overlap it, then pull up from two o’clock, and so on. When the edges are all pulled up, pinch the dough in the center together and give it a half twist so it stays closed while baking.
Bake in the oven for at least the time listed on the biscuit package, probably 10 to 15 minutes. A little darker than golden brown is probably about right. In the fire, keep an eye on them. Pick one up with tongs and poke it; it should be firm and a little crispy on the outside. My kids don’t mind them a little doughy, but I prefer the bread to be cooked through.
Also, consider cooking them at home, then having them handy when you return to camp while hunting. They’re good to eat cold, but they re-heat over the fire well, too.
If you have leftover biscuits in camp, stretch them out and wrap them around a stick and cook over the fire like marshmallows — everyone will love it, so plan to have leftover biscuits.