Firebuggz Pie Iron Review: An Avid Camper’s Opinion

Camping and summer have gone hand in hand for me since I was a kid. In those days, it meant packing up my parents’ old 70’s model orange and brown Winnebago and heading to one RV park or another. Growing up camping in an RV, we had a fridge, a freezer, and an oven for cooking. I actually didn’t experience cooking all my food over a fire until I was an adult, so I’m always looking for unique techniques to try.

Before heading out on a camping trip, I usually scour Pinterest for fun camping tips and hacks, as many adult women are want to do. Besides the regular tin foil packets and skewer recipes (most of which are good examples of Pinterest fails, by the way), I was interested in trying a few pie iron recipes using Firebuggz’ Heavy Duty Cast Iron Pie Iron.

The first night we arrived at the campground, (we being my boyfriend, our dog, and me) it was already getting pretty late. To beat the darkness, we settled for roasting a few brats and hot dogs over the campfire. I’d tried the Firebuggz Fire Fishing Poles when camping last summer, and they are super fun to roast marshmallows, but to be plain, we’re not really marshmallow people. I was happy to find that the Crank-Eez campfire roasters work amazingly for hot dogs and brats!

My boyfriend went for an over-the-top roasting method, but I always go for the hot coals. I loved how I was in complete control to maneuver my hot dog into the perfect spot but wasn’t worried about dropping it or covering it in ash from the logs. I did find a ton of fun dessert recipes for pie irons, but, as I said, we arrived too late to be able to see what we were doing. When you’re trying something new, sight is important. Full and ready for a day on the lake, we called it a night.

Out of all the recipes you can make in a pie iron - and there are a lot of them - we chose two; a quesadilla concoction and a ham and egg and croissant breakfast pie. On our first morning, we had a quick, cold breakfast with plans for a big lunch.


We lined the pie iron with a spritz of cooking spray and a flour tortilla. Then came the experimenting. We tried different methods - packing one side with ingredients and closing it together with another tortilla, folding the edges over (this seemed to work best) and a few different cooking times and temperatures. Some worked better than others, but we noticed that the pie iron took hardly any time to heat up. To get the perfect ooey gooey cheesiness without burning the edges of the tortilla, resting the iron on the outside of the fire’s logs worked best.

My first attempt didn’t go so well. Here, my method of finding the perfect coals worked against me. The cast-iron of the pie iron became (and stayed) hot quickly, so extra-hot coals weren’t necessary and blackened the edges of my quesadilla.

Despite a bit of burnt, I wasn’t discouraged. I peeled these bits off and gave them to the dog. The rest of my pie was delicious!

If you’ve ever seen a Firebuggz Pie Iron, you’ll know that they have sayings cast into the metal that read, “Yummy In My Tummy” and “Grubbin’ Time”. I propose that these sayings weren’t added for kids, but for 34-year-old men. Maybe it has something to do with the cliche of a man’s need to cook over an open flame, but my darling camping partner found words imprinted in a flour tortilla hilarious. Even after I was long full, he kept making more and more quesadillas to get better and better prints.

We met friends for dinner and enjoyed the air conditioning and mosquito-free atmosphere of a small diner. Of course, as we had made plans to try the iron once more to make a delicious breakfast, Mother Nature sent us home early with a very noisy 5 AM thunderstorm. We even took measures to conserve firewood the night before, though, couldn’t be bothered to check the weather forecast. In our defense, camping is about disconnecting, am I right?

So even though we only got to try one new campfire recipe, we got a ton of insight from it. We’ll definitely take this fun contraption out on our next wilderness adventure and try even more recipes. I imagine some sort of sandwich will be in order, as “Yummy In My Tummy” probably shows up really well on bread.