The Household Staples You Should Keep On Hand While Cooking Outdoors

While you can always focus on easy make-ahead meals to keep your next camping trip stress-free, sometimes it's fun to try and cook out in the wilderness, especially if you're hunting. Unfortunately, trying to clean everything with limited water isn't easy, especially a wooden cutting board. To keep things easy, there are two ingredients you should always have on hand when you're planning to cook outdoors, especially if you use a wooden cutting board — salt and lime. And no, it's not for seasoning your food, though acid and salt are always great additions to a campground meal. Together, these two supposedly work to not only clean any cutting board, but disinfect it as well.

Using lime and salt helps eliminate the leftover pieces or liquids that would have sat, ensuring your board is kept clean and fresh. And luckily, it's an easy enough process to use lime and salt to get the job done. You could also use a lemon if you have that lying around. For better scrubbing, you want larger pieces of salt, such as a coarse salt or rock salt, which is a pantry staple you can reuse to help keep your food cold while camping.  All you need to do is throw some salt on your board, squeeze a little of the juice from the lime on top, and then use half of the rind to scrub. You don't need a lot of the lime, and you can even just use the leftovers of pre-juiced citrus to get the job done. After giving it a good scrub, let the mixture sit for at least 10 minutes. Then,give it a quick wash with soap and water and you'll have a fresh-smelling and grime-free board.

There is some debate as to whether this method actually disinfects. There are experts who say that although these ingredients have their benefits, they can't kill off everything. Lemon does a great job of making hostile living conditions for microbes, while salt sucks out water from the microorganisms and kills them. However, bleach is still considered a better alternative. 

In short, using salt and lemon works great at getting rid of grime that you wouldn't be able to regularly scrub off, especially if you're somewhere where you are limited on water, and keeps your tool smelling fresh and clean. It's also great for removing stains that form on your board better than other products. However, it should be used alongside additional cleaners, especially bleach. You don't need much. Roughly 1 tablespoon, diluted with 1 gallon of water, is more than enough to kill off all of the pathogens that will take up home on the surface of your board. Despite it not being the perfect cleaner, these two ingredients are a great tool to carry when you are camping, along with the campfire cooking essential you don't want to forget when packing for your trip. Salt and limes don't take up much space, and you're likely already bringing them to season up your food. Since you can use limes or lemon you've already squeezed the juice from, it's also nice to use items you'd otherwise throw away.