The Fish Pizza Experiment (Camp cooking)

Some of us love to cook and come up with great recipes. It’s a journey—you burn things, you undercook things, you question your life choices—and then one day it finally works. For me, bread was the troublemaker. No matter what I did, it came out looking like a sad paperweight. Eventually I realized the problem wasn’t the universe punishing me—it was just bad proportions. Once I fixed that, suddenly I was a “bread person.”

Over the last few months, I’ve leveled up. Now I can make regular bread, pita bread, pizza dough… basically, if it involves flour and yeast, I’m in. And once you know the basics, you get to do the fun part—tinkering with it like a mad scientist who smells like dough.

This pizza started the usual way: water, yeast, a bit of sugar to make the yeast happy, then flour until it becomes dough instead of soup. Let it sit somewhere warm for an hour—I usually pretend it’s at a spa—then punch it down like it owes you money, roll it out, and add sauce and toppings.

Now, toppings are where things get interesting. I like experimenting, sometimes too much. This time I put sardines on the pizza because why not? I once had shrimp on pizza and it was great. Sardines? Also pretty solid. Smelt might work. Tuna? Absolutely not. Never again. That was a one-time mistake, like cutting your own hair at 2 a.m. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless you want your pizza to taste like regret.

Camp cooking makes all of this even more entertaining. You don’t have all your fancy tools or the exact ingredients you want, so you improvise. You become part chef, part survivor, part magician. But knowing the basics—like how to make dough that doesn’t double as a doorstop—gives you freedom. You can throw whatever you have on hand onto the pizza and hope for the best.

And honestly, that’s the fun of cooking. You experiment, you fail, you succeed, and sometimes you discover that sardines belong on pizza and tuna absolutely does not. It’s all part of the adventure.