MCA HUT! Archive

About a week into a long canoe voyage most everybody starts craving something. It might be lettuce or fresh fruit or meat. It might be dry shoes or toilet paper. Often it’s fresh bread of some kind. After all, crackers get old really fast. I was once on a trip where we had Triscuits for lunch every day for two weeks. I’ve never eaten another since. So it’s nice to know you can bake your own bread, bannock or biscuits in the backwoods. And it isn’t even that hard.

Now, my first experience with backcountry baking was something short of inspiring. It happened on a cool, drizzly, September evening. Our group huddled beside some now-forgotten Adirondack lake. We waited in the failing twilight as an artificially cheerful cook attempted to coax enough heat from a smoldering log into a reflector oven to bake a pan of brownies. After an hour or so, we scraped the sacrificial chocolate out of the pan and licked it off our spoons. It wasn’t exactly baked, but Mama had raised me to be polite and not waste chocolate.

So I was dubious, to say the least, when (years later) another cheerful cook ordered us out onto the Canadian Shield to gather blueberries for pies. Pies! I considered this an appalling waste of perfectly good blueberries, not to mention the intense labor of picking all those little, wild berries. But we all complied. There had been a "no blueberries, no dinner" ultimatum issued.

Those pies turned out to be more than mere dessert. They were an epiphany of sorts. No blueberry pie before or since has a ghost of a chance of favorable comparison to them. They were wonderful. They converted me into a True Believer and set me off on a (probably) lifelong avocation of backcountry baker.

Just what was the critical difference between disappointing, Adirondack, brownie sludge and blue-ribbon Ontario pies? Mostly the right kind of fire. My Canadian compatriots understood just what sort of fire was required to preheat that little, folded piece of aluminum as hot as the "real" oven in the kitchen back home. The folks in New York did not.

To be a happy and successful reflector oven baker, one must build a fast, bright, upright fire. Begin with a substantial pile of small, dry sticks. Lumberjack wannabees will disdain this sort of firewood as mere kindling and will probably feel thwarted in this pursuit, which favors hunter-gatherer sorts anyway. But that is what works best. Hunt for nice, dry sticks of a size that will break easily across your knee with a satisfying, resounding crack. Gather a sizeable pile near your fire pit. Gauge the size of your woodpile by how long you’ll need to keep the oven hot. Muffins that bake in 15-20 minutes need only a modest pile. Blueberry pies, which take an hour to reach golden perfection, require a more substantial one.

Light your fire with the reflector oven height requirement in mind. You’ll need to stand those nice, dry (and preferably long) sticks as close to vertical as possible as they go into the fire. Use that wet, smoldering log as an andiron to stand your firewood at attention. Or temporarily rearrange the fire-ring stones to create one high side. And keep in mind that reflector oven fires need frequent care and feeding. Delegate this job to the camp pyromaniac. There’s usually at least one.

Now you are ready to do some baking. Set up your reflector oven close to the fire, facing the flame. You can adjust the heat if you need to by scooting the oven closer to or farther from the flame - just like you do with your feet when you’re trying to warm your toes by the fire without burning up your boots. Pop the pan with whatever as-yet-unbaked goo you’ve chosen into the oven and stand back to watch. Chat up your fire feeder. This gives you the perfect vantage point from which to keep an eagle eye on the baking (and is quite convenient if you happen to be the camp pyromaniac and don’t mind talking to yourself).

Do keep a close eye on your bakery. Reflector oven heat is not perfectly even. The edge closest to the fire is always hottest. You’ll need to give the pan a quick quarter turn every now and then to get everything baked evenly. (We carry along a pair of leather work gloves, kept compulsively dry, to use as oven mitts.) It is a time-honored method that evolved from the fireplace rotisserie, through the reflector oven to the microwave turntable. It works.

With a well-tended fire and a well-turned pan, things will bake as quickly in a reflector oven as in a "real" oven at home. Then sit back and enjoy your fresh, hot muffins or brownies or coffeecake - or pies. Sure, there may be a little ash on the top, especially if you’ve been burning jack pine branches with needles and cones still attached. But you do have to pay for your pleasures somehow. Suffer for your art. Besides, didn’t your mom tell you charcoal was good for you every time she burned the toast?

If you’ve already eaten your lifetime quota of charcoal from the faulty toaster of your youth, you might prefer using a Dutch oven. Dutch ovens do a better job of keeping the fire out of the food. They also operate under an entirely different set of rules. And they need an entirely different sort of fire.

If a reflector oven fire can be likened to Grandma’s chucking of corncobs into the cookstove to brown the biscuits (as it can); a Dutch oven fire is more like the fire Grandpa banked in the woodstove for the night. A Dutch oven needs slow, even heat. It needs coals.

This is when you can enlist the usually willing assistance of the camp lumberjacks. They are usually quite happy to help cut up some large log for a good cause - or even a whole, hapless, fallen tree, if you don’t watch out. In any case, you will need larger wood to get coals. The finger-sized sticks used in a reflector oven fire burn down to feathery, cold ash in no time. For Dutch oven baking, you won’t need a large woodpile, just fairly large wood.

Swap a few stories with your camp mates while your fire burns down to coals. Then fill up the Dutch oven with whatever you’re baking and nestle it right in on top of the coals. You could pile coals on top of the Dutch oven as well to get the top heat necessary for even baking. But this generally proves a little awkward with the limited tools camp cooks usually have at their disposal. It is much easier to just light a twig fire on the Dutch oven lid. You can make this pot-lid fire as fierce as you like: most of the heat is going up and away anyway.

Now comes the hard part; not peeking. Timing is everything here. Lift the lid too soon or too often and the top won’t brown. Wait too long to peek and you have charcoal inside the oven as well as underneath. Using an extra baking pan elevated on one of those coiled, heat diffuser gizmos inside the oven helps a lot. So does an exquisite sense of timing.

Here I must confess that I am a recent convert to Dutch oven baking and, therefore, still a neophyte. This no peeking rule has undone me on several occasions. The worst was my first Dutch oven effort. I thoughtlessly permitted the camp pyromaniac to build up the fire again beside the oven before the baking was done. We ended up with Cajun blackened pecan rolls by mistake. The bread inside the caramel flambÈ casing was still passable. But it took a pickax and several boxes of Brillo to return the oven to working condition. The lesson here; keep a close watch on sugary stuff and allow flame only on top of the oven.

There are, of course, times and places where fires are impractical, unethical, or illegal. For those special occasions, there exist several different oven contraptions that fit right on your camp stove. I’ve never used them or even seen them in action. They are reputed to give everything the taste and consistency of a steamed pudding. But I am always willing to be converted. Just bring me some nice, fresh cinnamon rolls, hot out of the camp stove oven of your choice, to my tent door at about 8 o’clock some morning. I promise to keep an open mind.