Camp Menu: Pitta pocket pizzas

Before you begin 

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers.

Planning this activity

• Remember to check for allergies, eating problems or dietary requirements and adjust the recipe as needed. Make sure you’ve checked everyone’s dietary requirements and allergies then adapted the recipe as appropriate. This may include ensuring no cross-contamination during food storage, preparation and serving, too.  
• Check if there are any items of food (or packaging) that people can’t touch or be near to or if there are items that people might not be comfortable using in the activity. 
• Be conscious about who may be fasting when providing snacks, eating and drinking – you may want to plan this activity for when everyone can get involved or leave out the eating and drinking part.
• Everyone should wash their hands.
• Everyone should build and light a fire.

Prepare your fire

Once the last flames die down, most of what’s left will be a type of fuel called white coals.

1. Someone should use a stick to spread the white coals out. It’s up to you how you position your coals. To create gradually increasing temperatures, make sure there’s more at the back of the fire bed, sloping into a smaller amount at the front. Spreading the coals evenly will mean everything cooks on the same amount of heat.
2. The fire is now ready for cooking, with adult supervision. Wearing heatproof gloves, you could use a billy can, an adult could place a grate over the fire, or you can cook the pittas in foil directly on the coals.

Make your meal

1. Ask everyone to get into small groups of between four and six people. Each recipe card makes one pitta pizza, so each group should work together to make a pitta pizza for each person. You may want to group people with similar dietary requirements together to make it easier and avoid cross contamination.
2. Everyone should wash their hands.
3. Groups should get ready to cook by making sure their area and their equipment is clean and ready to go.
4. Give each group a copy of the recipe card, their equipment, and their ingredients.
5. With adult supervision, everyone should follow their recipe card to make the pizza pockets.
6. When they’re ready, an adult wearing heatproof gloves should remove the pizza pockets and place them in a safe, stable area, that’s away from young people, to cool down.
7. Once they’ve cooled down, everyone can enjoy their pizza pockets.

Extinguish your fire and clean up

1. Once everyone has finished using the fire, no one should add any more wood. The fire will die down.
2. Someone should use a new stick (not one that’s been in the fire) to carefully spread out the wood and embers so they cool down faster.
3. Someone should pour water over the smouldering wood and ashes to make sure they’re fully extinguished. They should use the stick to mix the water through the ashes.
4. Everyone should work together to clear up quickly and efficiently – each group needs to wash up their utensils and dispose of rubbish and leftovers.

Reproduced from the original post found on Scouts UK: https://www.scouts.org.uk/activities/make-pitta-pocket-pizzas/