Adventures in Fry-Baking

First-time Fry-Baking, thermometer on top.

Looking back at the first few posts, I'm beginning to notice a trend... food & cooking. In keeping with the trend, today's post is about baking outdoorsy-style. It's not that lightweight of a way to cook, as you need to bring the pan, cover, liquid fuel and assorted ingredients... but we discovered it's well worth it!

How did we land on this idea? Chris, always the instigator of seemingly crazy ideas, wanted to learn how to cook real food on backpacks. He still has a strong preference for Cous cous, yet yearned for something more complex and delicious. He found a great solution for making appetizers, desserts and breakfast goodies with the 8" Fry-Bake Pan and Outback Oven Ultralight Set of various accessories, including a pot grabber, oven cover and thermometer.

So for our trial run, we decided to experiment with making chocolate cake, practicing for a backpack a week or so later. Cake in the woods? Crazy I say! We mixed up the ingredients according to the recipe booklet, poured it into the pan, and ventured onto my back patio. According to the directions, the Fry-Bake works best with white gas stoves, so out came the Ye-Olde MSR Whisper Lite. We lit up the stove with the scotch buster and pan on top, and slowly lowered the pot cozy over the whole thing. Initially the stove was cranking too high. We soon figured out our mistake as the pot cozy starting smoking from the sides! So we adjusted the cozy, turned down the output to as low as possible and waited, closely watching the thermometer rise from WARM, to BAKE to BURN. When the dial pointed to the B in BURN, we shut off the stove, letting the temperature slowly lower, and would start it up again before the temp got too low. Within 20 min, we had warm chocolate cake! A little burnt on the bottom due to our initial screw up, but we were very impressed with its height. While a little dry and overcooked, I couldn't help but to eat 2-3 warm pieces small pieces on the spot.

Fry-Bake pan on stove with pot cozy

 

Delightfully thick cake despite burnt bottom:)

The pot cozy is an interesting idea, and works well when you don't singe it's sides. We can't seem to figure out a way not to do that, as it's a very close fit over the stove and pan. You can start a little fire on the cover of the pan with sticks for a similar effect as the pot cozy, but we spared ourselves the messiness. All in all, the system works pretty well. You need to pay alot of attention to make sure you don't burn your food and cozy, and you're always watching the clock and smelling for "baked-doneness". We couldn't wait to use it in the woods!

Chris upped the ante a few weeks later, when he brought the Fry-Bake on a backpack along the Cohos Trail. He made Foccacia bread, ill-fated brownies, and delightful breakfast cinnamon rolls. More on that, and the Cohos Tail, in the next post!

DIY Explorer Food

Nuts, nuts, berries, nuts!

This past May, my boyfriend Chris & I challenged ourselves to a Seven Continent Cooking Challenge: cooking one meal from each continent in one month. The real challenge wasn’t agreeing on recipes or finding the time to cook... the real challenge was figuring out what the heck to cook for Antarctica!

Since there are no known indigenous inhabitants on Antarctica, we would not be able to cook authentic Antarctican... whatever that may be. Seal and penguin came to mind but didn’t really appeal (and isn’t readily available). So instead we racked our brains to come up with suitable Antarctican delight. This lead me back to the story, The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, where he and a small team of two chronicled their adventures across Antarctica in the early 1900s. They weren’t attempting to reach the South Pole, as others were at the time, but instead they were gathering Emperor penguin eggs for scientific study. Apsley's story tells a harrowing tale of hauling heavy sledges across the frozen land, losing their only tent in a gale force wind (and then finding it!) and the everyday difficulties of doing just about everything in that bitter, windswept landscape. I distinctly remember the relative joy they experienced while huddled around their Primus cookstove, despite the meagerness of their meals. Their English diet consisted mainly of hot tea, pemmican and biscuits. I had never heard of pemmican before, and I soon discovered it’s a dense, high calorie food mixture, originating from the Native North Americans. Traditionally made from dried meat, rendered fat, berries and nuts, they were rolled into balls and dropped into boiling water to make a stew. Sound like a boullion cube? We thought so too. It can also be formed into ready-to-eat bars for more temperate conditions, kinda like beef jerky and great for backpacking! We decided pemmican was the best possible solution to our challenge: the original Antarctican survival food by early explorers...and the perfect snack for our upcoming summer adventures.