Sage advice for eating well by the water, hiding your booze, and avoiding sand in food. Sage advice for eating well by the water, hiding your booze, and avoiding sand in food.
Beachside picnic must haves
Here’s a handful of tips designed to help you have the best possible beachfront feast, while avoiding common pitfalls like a gutful of grit, open-container citation, sad snack selection, ice shortage, slipped disc, and/or underwhelmed date.
The ice situation
If you’re in it for the long haul, losing ice power early is no joke: Per the FDA, cold cuts and other perishable provisions should be kept at or below 40 degrees Fahrenheit (and if it’s uncertain, always adhere to the stomach-preserving “when in doubt, toss it out” precept). Start out strong with a mixture of block ice or reusable freezer packs on the bottom of a cooler, then layer with blocks, freezer packs, and cubed ice as you go, packing as densely as possible — buy about a pound of ice per quart capacity of your cooler. (Next-level-insulation-obsessed Yeti prides itself on its coolers’ ability to maintain a long-term relationship with ice.)
Stack food according to when you’ll be using it to minimize shuffling.
Layer steaks, burgers, and bratwurst meant for your dinnertime cookout on the bottom (anything raw belongs on the bottom, to avoid cross contamination). Stick lunchtime hoagies in the middle, snack dips and s’mores chocolate on top (more on these food choices below). Freeze water bottles before leaving the house, then remove from the cooler and thaw throughout the day as needed.
You will need snacks
In between meals, set up a shaded smorgasbord of hardy granola bars, jerky, fresh fruit and/or fruit bars, nut mix, chips, and pretzels. Keep pickled or hard-boiled eggs, salsas, and spreads in the cooler, available upon request. And an on-site charcuterie board is not nearly as absurd as it sounds, and takes just 10 minutes to prep: Slice up a few salami and summer sausages (or pre-slice at home), unwrap a hunk of warm-weather-friendly Piave Vecchio or a fresh goat’s milk cheese, tear a baguette into chunks or open a box of fancy crackers, uncap a container of assorted olive bar sundries, section a few pieces of seasonal fruit, and toss in a handful of smoked almonds. Arrange everything on a cutting board, lightweight platter, or rimmed baking sheet. This is not hard. This is very impressive. Definitely do this if you’re on a date, and even if they end up ultimately ghosting you, they’ll never forget you.
Since you aren’t worried about packing light, go ahead and bring along little luxuries like portable speakers, pop-up beach tents, and a mini wading pool for cooling off/chilling several 24-packs at once.
Packing light is totally overrated
Unfortunately for beachgoers with a lot of baggage, the ideal stretch of sand is rarely steps from the parking lot, and ice-crammed coolers are heavy. Invest in an all-terrain wagon or beach cart for long-distance hauling, or commandeer a boogie board or sled to drag coolers, blankets, beach chairs, folding tables, umbrellas, surfboards, firewood, beer, and passed-out picnickers (of all ages) to and fro.
On a smaller scale, picnic equipment not to be forgotten at home includes dishware (bamboo, melamine, and enamelware are both lightweight and reusable), silverware, napkins or paper towels, a sharp knife or two, a cutting board, barbecue tongs, matches, and the wine opener. I repeat, the wine opener.
Depending on where you live, you’re probably not supposed to drink alcohol at the beach, but the reality is, you want to drink alcohol at the beach, and life is short. Brown paper bags and beer koozies are a bit obvious, so get craftier if you’d prefer to avoid a run-in with the beach patrol. Pre-portion individual servings of rosé or pre-mixed cocktails in lidded eight-ounce Mason jars (or plastic/metal cups if glass is also a beach no-no) and keep them on ice until needed, transfer your alcoholic beverage of choice into stainless steel water bottles or thermoses before leaving the house, or dedicate a cooler or roomy tote to being the pour-into-a-benign-plastic-Solo-cup zone, and never ever let that incriminating bottle or can see the light of day.
Consider boozy popsicles, boozy ice cubes, and boozy Otter Pops (or whatever frozen novelties the kids are secretly concealing alcohol in these days). And this goes without saying, but if you plan to imbibe at the beach, recruit a sober driver, and compensate them with expertly mixed mocktails: think a bottle of Pok Pok Som drinking vinegar and a 12-pack of Pamplemousse La Croix.
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