This recipe is a favorite of mine, whether fixed around the campfire or on the kitchen stove. It is a recipe created from near starvation on the Indian reservations in the late 1880s. Native American people were being shorted on the rations of beef and other food and had little more than flour and oil readily available. From necessity sprang the campfire genius of fry bread.

One of my favorite recipes for fry bread comes from a good friend of mine, retired Indiana Conservation Officer Tony Sanders, and is taken from the out-of-print cookbook, Wild Hoosier Home Cooking 2002 as compiled by the Indiana Conservation Officers Organization.

The ingredients are: 2 cups of flour; 2 tsp. baking powder; 2 tsp. salt; 2 tablespoons of shortening; 2/3 cup water and vegetable oil.

Mix the dry ingredients together, cut in the shortening. Sprinkle in the water while tossing the dough with a fork until all the flour is moist and the dough almost cleans the bowl. Cover and refrigerate or place in a cooler for 30 minutes.

Heat one inch of oil in a heavy pan to 400 degrees F. Divide the dough into 12 pieces and roll each piece into a 6-inch circle. Let the dough pieces rest a few minutes. Make a 1/2-inch hole in the middle of each circle and fry until puffy and golden, about 1 minute on each side.

The hole is to ensure complete cooking, but also served our Native Americans a method of lifting the fry bread from the hot oil. They simply inserted a small, clean stick in the hole and lifted the pieces out.

Piping hot and dusted with powdered sugar or smeared with honey or jam…fry bread goes fast, so make sure you fix plenty.

You’ll find more recipes for dishes to accompany the meat and fish that you’ve harvested yourself in every issue of MidWest Outdoors, available by subscribing on our website.