Baking
From WildWiki
Contents |
Baking Skills
Baking provides creative and nutritious alternatives to the one-pot “spooze” meal. This skill allows our students to buy cheap staples such as flour and live like kings; plus it can earn them social points when they return home and camp with their friends.
Educational Goals
The ability to produce quick bread biscuits and pizzas should be in each student’s cooking repertoire. The more ambitious ones can learn to make yeast bread or calzones later. Good hygiene must be an integral part of their baking experience.
Key Points
Basic Baking Start with a simple, quick rising dough. Explain the difference between yeast and baking powder, and point out the different properties of whole wheat flour, white flour, corn meal, and baking mix. Make sure you have both clean utensils and clean hands. Demonstrate how to mix a basic dough. Explain how moisture determines the bread type: pancake batter pours easily, cake batter is thicker but still pours, cookie dough fall in wet globs from a spoon, and bread dough is dry and can be handled without sticking.
Yeast baking includes some further considerations. You will get the best results on a warm, sunny day when the dough can sit outside to rise, but when it is cloudy, you can use a sleeping bag or warm belly to provide heat. Often it is helpful to activate your yeast separately from the dry ingredients to make sure it is alive and producing carbon dioxide. The yeast is working when it foams after being placed in warm sugar water. Once your dough is made, grease and flour the frying pan to avoid sticking. The dough should only fill the pan halfway, since it will rise as it cooks.
The Outdoor Oven Baking requires low, even heat on all sides. In the wilderness, you can create such an oven using either your stove or a fire.
With your stove on simmer, light a twig fire on the frying pan lid to provide heat from above. Burn pencil-sized sticks. Put your dough on to cook in your pre-greased pan. Rotate the pan every few minutes to ensure even heat. Baking will be most controlled if your rotations are systematic. Demonstrate how to use the around-the-clock method for ideal heat distribution. Once the baked good is finished, let the twig fire burn down to ash and cool before you spread the remains.
The principles of baking are the same with a campfire, but you use coals as your heat source. Build a fire and let the wood burn down to hot coals. Spread a layer of coals off to one side of the main flame, and place your frying pan on top. With a shovel or pot lid, pile more coals on the frying pan lid. If your coals are even, you do not need to rotate using this method. Check to make sure your dough is not burning. If it gets too hot cool the pan in snow or a shallow puddle if you are cooking many dishes on one fire, have a coal generation fire on one side, and a cooking area on the other.
For some breads, particularly those with a stiff dough, you can bake with only bottom heat by using the flip technique. To do this, grease and flour the lid. When the dough is brown on the bottom, flip the entire pan onto its lid and finish baking.
Teaching Considerations
Get students baking as soon as they show a basic aptitude for cooking. For some inexperienced outdoor cooks, the idea of baking is intimidating. For others, they may need no introductions once they master the stoves. Ease natural fears by showing them how to create tasty items with minimum fuss. Model impeccable hygiene throughout your demonstration to establish better habits in your students.
Leadership Opportunities
If you do a bake-a-long, this gives you the opportunity to show a flexible, coaching style of leadership and to demonstrate comfort with chaos. Chaos can be critical to the development of leadership in individuals. Tolerate it when you have the time for it.
Resources The NOLS Cookery
