The Chuck Wagon Cook Who Refused to Fade Away
Kent Rollins quit a full-time job with benefits to buy a chuck wagon in 1991. People told him he was a fool. He told them he was going to do what he loved and give God the glory. Today, he has millions of YouTube followers, a bestselling cookbook, and a hit show on the Outdoor Channel. The mission has not changed. He still feeds cowboys with a well-seasoned iron skillet and a fire he built himself.
Rollins grew up working cattle along the Red River in southwest Oklahoma. His father was a cowboy, a farrier, and a part-time veterinarian without a license. His mother taught him that fire brought people together, first for light and warmth, and then for food. When it was nine degrees outside, and the wind cut through the branding pens, the kitchen was warm. She let him in.
"I was very fortunate to grow up around a bunch of old-timers that were heroes to me," Rollins says. "They stood tall as giant oak trees, and they could do more with a grass rope than anything I'd ever seen in my life."
His father would leave him with those men and tell him to pay attention. He might learn something. There was never a day that went by that he did not. They taught him the value of land, what it meant to be a steward, and to always praise God for everything he had.
In 1983, Rollins was riding bulls and rodeoing hard when his uncle asked him to guide hunters in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. They packed everything in on a mule 21 miles into the wilderness. His uncle threw out Dutch ovens and skillets. Nobody had taught Rollins how to bake in a Dutch oven, so he figured it out through trial and error.
The first morning, he woke up at 1:30 a.m. to make biscuits. He gave them two hours to rise. Two hours later, they had not moved. When he cooked them, they still did not rise. The hunter asked if it was flatbread. Rollins told him it was flatbread today, but he did not know what it would be tomorrow.
It took three or four days before he remembered enough chemistry from high school to figure out the altitude problem. He doubled the yeast, added baking soda to the baking powder, and kept moving forward.
"Trial and error was always my biggest teacher when I was baking something in a Dutch oven," Rollins says. "You spend six, seven weeks out there at a time, you learn from your mistakes, but you never rule out that there's something gonna be different tomorrow 'cause Mother Nature plays a big role in whatever you're trying to cook with an open fire."
By late 1991, Rollins bought his first chuck wagon. He started cooking for ranches in the spring of 1992. The old hands respected him because they knew he had been on the other side of the fire. He learned quickly from an old man named Mac who told him that anybody could fry meat and boil coffee. The real test was whether he could make bread, dessert, cakes, and pies.
Twenty years later, Rollins cooked for Mac's surprise birthday party. Mac came around the corner of the barn and told him he had finally made a cook. It took him long enough.
Before he bought the wagon, Rollins was rodeoing and day working. His father told him that if he was going to be a cowboy, he better know how to do about 43 other things or he would go broke. Rollins learned to drive a road grader, a bulldozer, and a front-end loader. He worked on windmills, built houses, and made cabinets. He did whatever it took to get by.
His father also told him to do something he loved and do it better than anybody else. If he did that, he would never have a job. He would be on vacation the rest of his life. Rollins has been on vacation ever since.
When he decided to leave his full-time job, people told him he was crazy. He had no insurance, no retirement, and no backup plan.
"I'm gonna do what I wanna do," Rollins says. "I'll give God the glory and the credit for it, and if he is thinking this is what I need to do, he'll be by my side every day and we'll make it work."
Society tells people they need to be comfortable. Rollins believes the opposite.
"If you're never challenged, you never change," he says.
His wife, Shannon, is the one who turned the cooking videos into a business. She came from cowboy country around Elko, Nevada, and knew nothing about Dutch ovens when they met. She came to his cooking school three times before he figured he was going to have to marry her if she was ever going to graduate. On the second year at the Bell Ranch, the wind was blowing 70 miles an hour and the dirt was eating them alive. He told her she could go sit in the truck. She turned around and told him this was what they did, and they did it better than anybody else. If he could not take it, she could handle it by herself.
They work 365 days together now. They film, they cook, they sit on the porch and look out at the White Mountain wilderness. Rollins tells her every morning that the glass is half full. They never take a day for granted. Four years ago, a Marine named Lance Corporal Cody Childers sent him a message from Afghanistan. He said nine of them had gathered around a laptop to watch a video, and it made them feel like they were home. Three weeks later, his mother called to say they lost Cody to an IED. The flag that flew over his service in Washington, D.C., now flies with the Studebaker wagon everywhere it goes.
"You may be the only Jesus that people see that day," Rollins says. "So make a difference, know that you can be counted on, and put it out there."
He is 40 years removed from making $40 a day in a teepee. He has cooked for thousands, written bestsellers, and built a YouTube audience that treats him like family. What keeps him grounded is simple. The love of a good woman, three or four good dogs, a cup of coffee, and a can of snuff. His father taught him to look for a soft eye when picking out a horse. It works even better with people. Rollins has had some really good horses in his life, some really good dogs, and the best wife ever. That is all a man really needs. The rest is just stories worth telling around the fire.
