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Barry Murray was born in Oregon, before escaping to Alaska to, "get away from civilization." He is best know as the old-fashioned diamond-hitch packer (LIFE Magazine, September 3, 1971) who took his family, children 8, 10, 12 years-old, horseback from Mexico to Canada, before the Sierra Club pressured the U.S. Forest Service to 'outlaw' horses on the 2,500 mile long trail he had pioneered.
Barry feels in his online book of the experience, www.SearchForAShadowOfThePast.com, that the jealousy of backpackers on weekend adventures from big cities, not being able, due to weight, to dine on Dutch oven meals, was the demise of a 'historically registered' way of life. Particularly when it came to Old West things as, "doubled smoked" bacon, which was how Murray found Camp Chef's Ultimate Roaster in the first place.
In an upcoming article Murray is working on for us, he will explain the importance of double smoking for preservation, and recreating a frontier taste unknown to meat departments in Anchorage supermarkets. He has found the problem to be in finding flitches of old-fashioned smoked bacon, to smoke himself a second time, to accompany his wife's sourdough breakfasts. Check in here occasionally, and on the Murray's column on www.MotorHomeTraveler.com, to find the double-smoke answer.
Murray's 'professional' culinary experience came about by being stranded in an Eskimo village at the mouth of the Yukon River, just as the snow was about to fly, with only $26 in his pocket. He signed on as a sea cook on a six weeks cruise on a converted WWII LSI cannery ship (see the article Chilkoot To The Sea on www.AlaskaTravelMagazine.com) to Seattle.
The downside of this adventure, that involved cooking hundreds of pounds of live Alaskan King Crab, was the knowledge that to be the ultimate gourmet, one has to travel to a harvest. This is why much of www.RVTravelMagazine.com deals with finding a source of Dungeness crab, and Oregon oysters (which the Murray's featured before Rachel Ray) in their publications, and ours.
Thanks Murray's -which we feel equally talented in perusing the ultimate in culinary taste- for inviting Camp Chef along in your pursuit of 'Old West' flavors. We promise not to embarrass Barry by mentioning that prior to his 'rural Alaska' days he had been a Contributing Photographer to the elite San Francisco Magazine, known for his unique coverage of the very best restaurants in the Bay Area, and the recipes featured in the column, "Dining In." An interest in things gourmet in life has many turnings. | 