Everybody likes roasting a marshmallow over a campfire or fire pit, the best of autumn’s fire-related food activities. Everybody but me! I am sick of watching the youths butcher delicious marshmallows with their amateurish roasting methods!
You are not fooling anybody with your Oh but I like my marshmallow charred and bubbly like this shit, young persons. Anyway that is not even what I was screeching about! Char it all you damn like. I like a little char on mine, too. I am screeching about how you charred it before the inside of the marshmallow had even had time to melt. That was, and is, bullshit.
All the time, you hear the youths saying, Actually, that is how I like my marshmallow: ruined, bad, rushed through the delicate roasting process so that it is charred on the outside but still has a dense, rubbery wad of cool marshmallow at the core. I like how it adheres to the dang stick when you try to get it off there. I, a worthless puke human, want it that way on purpose and for sure am not just saying that to get this enraged old person off my case. That’s a lie, and I see right through to the desperate cry for help hiding behind it!
Let me tell you what happened to your destroyed bullshit marshmallow. You rammed it right into the flames like a goddamn child. Like an animal. And because you did this, it burned. That is what happened to your marshmallow. You cooked it wrong. Your marshmallow roasting techniques were—are—shabby and careless. What happened to your marshmallow is this: an asshole ruined it.
Here is how a wise Elder cooks a dang marshmallow. It’s too late for that piece of crap you incinerated! But you can do better in the future, if any fool ever trusts you with a marshmallow and a stick ever again.
First of all, I, a Tough Woodsman, like to roast a nice, big marshmallow. Here is one nearly the size of this frickin’ orange tennis ball that I found on the ground in my yard and felt no qualms about placing on a table next to something I’d later eat.
The reason I like to roast this absurdly large marshmallow is, first of all, because it rules. But secondly, the best part of a well-roasted marshmallow is the gooey center, and this thing’s got like a gallon of gooey center. Thirdly, with a marshmallow this size, you can use a bigger stick to roast it, and then you don’t have to worry about the stick burning and snapping and dropping your marshmallow into the fire. But mainly it’s just more fun to roast a marshmallow the size of a compact car, is what it comes down to. I don’t have to explain myself to you! Moving on!
Maybe you prefer a puny baby marshmallow for cowards. Maybe you want to pretend that you are satisfied by one of those stupid pencil-eraser marshmallows. That’s fine. Suit yourself.
As for the stick, listen. Possibly you do not live deep in the remote wilderness like I, a Frightening Backwoods Type, do. Maybe in “the big city” they think it is “weird” and “will arrest you” if you climb the decorative trees and snap off their limbs for marshmallow-roasting sticks. But then again, if you live in the big city, probably you were not going to have a campfire for roasting your marshmallows in the first place. Probably you were going to use the sad burner on your sad stove, or you were going to hold your marshmallow over the slots in your toaster, in which case you can use a bamboo chopstick instead of a mighty roasting scepter.
For all others, who live in places where you can have a campfire or a fire pit, you will want a stick that is:
- Stiff enough to hold your big marshmallow without bending down toward the flames;
- Long enough to reach out over the flames without requiring you to climb into the fire; and
- As straight as you can find, so that you can rotate your marshmallow from way over at the safe end of the stick without the marshmallow bobbing all over the place.
Some sporting or camping goods-type stores, or even big fancy supermarkets, will sometimes have the fancy 36-inch bamboo skewers that are specially made for this important job. They’re great. However, you don’t need them. You also don’t need these stupid-ass shits. You just need a frickin’ stick. You can find a stick. The world is full of sticks!
But the stick is dirty, you are mewling, despicably. A deer could have cleaned its butt with this stick! Go to hell! Stick the tip of the stick into the fire for a few seconds, to like sterilize it or whatever. It’ll be fine. Marshmallows are antiseptic, probably. Also I don’t think that’s the sort of thing deer actually do.
Got your marshmallow? Got your stick? Cram the end of that stick right on into one of the flat sides of the marshmallow. There’s no special technique for this. Just cram it on in there.
Are you making s’mores? Who are we kidding, of course you are making s’mores. In that case you should take a few seconds to setup the rest of the s’more that will receive your eventual perfectly roasted marshmallow. I set mine up, on a highly suspect surface, like so:
Maybe you like to use a square from a chocolate bar. It’s none of my business. We had chocolate chips, and I used ‘em. I refuse to get sidetracked on this. This is a post about roasting the friggin’ marshmallow!
One time we were making s’mores and I had the idea to shove some semi-sweet chocolate chips into the stick-hole in my absurdly large marshmallow. The thinking was, the chocolate would melt and liquefy when the inside of the marshmallow heated up, and then I would have gooey liquid marshmallow and gooey liquid chocolate while everyone else just had gooey marshmallow and at best half-melted chocolate, and then I could lord my superior s’more over their sorry loser asses and do a touchdown dance and stomp out the fire and tell them all to get the hell off my property.
But actually what happened was, when the chocolate melted, it lowered the surface tension between the melty marshmallow and the stick, and therefore the stick just slipped and slid in the liquid chocolate when I tried to rotate the marshmallow, but the marshmallow itself did not turn, but rather dropped off the end of the stick like a big delicious chocolate-filled dessert bomb and plopped right into the hot core of the fire, where it burned away to ash. That’s probably the worst I’ve ever owned myself, actually. What I am saying here is, don’t get any funny ideas about shoving some chocolate into the core of your marshmallow. It doesn’t work that way.
What’s this I am hearing about “rotating the marshmallow”? you are asking. That is the second time you have made reference to rotating the marshmallow and I am starting to freak out big-time over here. Well, it’s like this: You have to rotate your marshmallow. That’s the main thing, here. You could almost say this whole post is just “you have to rotate your marshmallow” padded out with a lot of scolding and insults, if you want to be a jerk about it.
How you roast your marshmallow is, you hold it out at the end of your stick so that the marshmallow is in the air over or near part of the campfire but not in the flames, maybe a foot or so away from any actual flames if it’s a nice hot fire, and angled upward so that the marshmallow is higher than your hand (sit down if you must), and you rotate the marshmallow, constantly, in this area of hot but not blazing air. Rotate it kind of quickly, in fact! Here is that .GIF from up top, again, to show you how quickly to rotate the marshmallow:
What you are doing is, you are warming the marshmallow gradually and evenly. This way, the outside of the marshmallow will not burst into flames before the very innermost part of the marshmallow turns into fluffy, airy, liquid marshmallow goo. This way, you are making a perfectly roasted marshmallow.
What will happen, if you are doing this properly, is that after like ten minutes of patient, constant rotating, you will notice that your marshmallow has expanded in size and also gotten pretty wobbly out there on the end of the stick, and that the outside of the marshmallow has turned a very nice caramel color. Keep turning that sucker! After a few more turns, you will notice that the stick seems to have lost friction inside the marshmallow; this is your indication that the very deepest core of the marshmallow has liquefied. Shit yeah, buddy. Your marshmallow is ready.
Now you can decide. You have always defended your bullshit trash marshmallows, in the past, by saying that you prefer them burnt and bubbly all over. If that’s actually true, and not just a feeble smokescreen thrown in front of your incompetence, you can very quickly lower the marshmallow into the flames to light it on fire, then pull it out and blow it out hastily before it burns through or falls off the stick. I have a hunch that you will not choose to do this. I have a hunch that the smooth, unburnt, caramel-colored surface of your marshmallow has aroused your appetite, and that you would not trade that for the ugly pumice look of your former marshmallows.
In any case, act quickly! Now that your marshmallow is basically a big hot cloud of delicious foam, the stick will cut right through it and it will fall into the fire if you don’t get it out of there.
You can eat this marshmallow just how it is, right off the stick, if you want. Honestly, it will be heaven, fluffy all the way through, a gently crispy bag of fluffy, airy, hot marshmallow liquid, right down to the (hygienic!) stick, with no gross wad of unmelted marshmallow anywhere down in there. Or, you can lay it on that chocolate-topped cracker and withdraw the stick from it in a slow twirling motion, and have the best damn s’more you ever had! Like this one:
But that marshmallow is way too big for that s’more, you are saying. It will get all over the place. It will squeeze out of the sides of the cracker as soon as I take a bite, and then there will be big droopy gobs of liquid marshmallow hanging out of my s’more like the sides of Sam Elliott’s mustache. Also I’m very grossed out that you used that visibly filthy outdoor table as a plate. What is wrong with you. Here is what I say to that!
Now get the hell off my property!