Japanese solo camping enthusiast, skeet shooter and game hunter Ly-ro shi リロ氏 really gets good mileage out of a hot sandwich grill. A quick look through his Twitter feed will show you videos of him preparing everything from skewered meats to ham and cheese to quick calzones with a sandwich grill, all prepared with panache using camping gear. We've even embedded a few at the bottom of this article.

His cooking videos almost always do well, typically getting upwards of 10,000 likes, sometimes more than 50,000 and higher.

It's a safe bet that many of his followers were surprised by the video he posted last weekend, however. It starts out plainly enough with two slices of white bread on a chopping board in the foreground and his trusty Tsubamesanjo TSBBQ hot grill in the background. But just when you think you'll see some tasty ingredients to make a delicious grilled sandwich, you soon realize this video is different...

He begins by crumbling up a slice of bread...

Reproduced with permission from Ly-Ro Shi (@ly_rone)

...and making it into tiny bread balls

Reproduced with permission from Ly-Ro Shi (@ly_rone)

Then he slices up the crust into pieces for a different kind of texture:

Reproduced with permission from Ly-Ro Shi (@ly_rone)

That's it. Two different textures made out of bread, sandwiched within two slices of bread ... And into the grill it goes!

Reproduced with permission from Ly-Ro Shi (@ly_rone)

Voila! You have yourself grilled bread sandwich. Slice it in half diagonally, and you'll see the tasty ingredients inside, piping hot and ready to eat.

Reproduced with permission from Ly-Ro Shi (@ly_rone)

But wait, there's more. Looking for some condiments to go with that? Well, why not some bread balls or crust slices?

Reproduced with permission from Ly-Ro Shi (@ly_rone)

His Tweet in which he posted the video has over 84,000 likes and 2,700 retweets at the time of writing:

Ly-Ro Shi jokingly calls his recipes "hopelessly brainless" but you have to wonder about this one. It's almost a zen koan (How do you make a sandwich when you have nothing to fill it with?), or perhaps even a philosophical reflection on solo cooking (no accompaniments, just go solo). But maybe it's just Ly-ro Shi simply having a bit of fun for the benefit of his followers. The perfect self-sufficient sandwich? Bready player one?

And as we mentioned earlier, you'll find plenty of hot grill videos featuring ingredients other than bread if you look through Ly-ro Shi's Twitter's account:

Margherita and cheddar cheese sausage calzone:

Tonpei-yaki (thin pork belly slices, shredded cabbage and egg):

He also does great work with other camp cooking gear, like this bok-choy and shrimp Al ajillo:


Ly-ro Shi wrote a cookbook called 「リロ氏ソロキャンレシピ」 "Ly-Ro Shi's Solo Camping Recipes," now available on Amazon, which also comes in a Kindle version so you can easily take it with you on your next camping excursion.

You can also follow him on Twitter to see more of his recipes and other outdoor pursuits in the Japanese outback.


By - Ben K.