Reflector Oven Bread

Description

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Tags: Pathfinder,Survival,Bushcraft,Reflector Oven,Camp Cooking,The Pathfinder School,Old Scout Reflector Oven

Video Transcription

morning guys Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school out here by the fire underneath the tarp at a camp here and just kind of get the fire going here what I wanted to do today was I wanted to number one I wanted to look at a product a reflector oven I've got two of them from two different companies pretty much the only two companies that make them in the US now and I want to test those reflector ovens not because it's something I want to carry my bushcraft kit every single day of the week but because I'm studying some of horse Kephart's writings right now and I he mentions in his book camp cookery quite often using this reflector oven so I want to try and bake a loaf of bread today using his recipe in a reflector oven so I've got to get a fire going to do that cook myself up some salt cured bacon while I'm waiting have a little lunch but what I wanted to talk about a little bit as we go through this series on Camp cooker is you know horse Kephart was very much like in us McCann that he was an innovator in his time as far as camping and wood craft and you know tramping as nesic would call it into the woods for recreational purposes and I think that you know it's interesting to think about the fact that we know when these guys are and we mention their names all the time like a part and like nesic and the only media outlet they had a hundred years ago when their writings were prevalent was the written word print was all they had nowadays we have the internet we have Facebook YouTube and all these different media let's just run our name out all over the world and years ago all they had was the printed word and circulation of print was not as premium at that time either and yes still we know who these people are that's how much of an imprint or impact they made on people's lives and I think that's interesting and something that we as woodsmen today should try to emulate and impact as many lives as we can and pass on that tribal knowledge so that's what I'm going to try to do with some of this camp cooking series talking about the different implements that he used to cook with it some of his recipes and we're gonna start by making bread and a reflector oven stay with me guys okay guys so let's start out by putting this reflector oven together it actually folds very very flat and you can see it's the same size of my haversack disassembled and very very thin now you've got a package here probably less than to write out a quarter of an inch total

inside this haversack now old Scout and this is an old Scout reflector oven out of Minnesota he ships these in a burlap type or some kind of a canvas II tote bagg looking thing like your wife would bring home from the mall so I put mine and it's a little bit oversized and I put mine in my hover sack because it fits in there just perfectly and it's a really really simple system it has three aluminum rods that basically become your grill where you'd put your baking pan whatever you're cooking in you have a series of clips and you have 12 of them that assemble the whole thing and then you have the pieces of parts of the oven itself and it's pretty simplistic I like the fact that it's so simple actually and basically it's just like a origami puzzle that you put together it's very very simple you don't really need instructions all you have to do is look at the thing and you can pretty much tell how it goes together it's got a front in the back and it's got a top it's got one shelf here obviously that piece fits into I've got one just like that for the other side that goes here and then once you put those in you would just put those pins through these holes and I've got these pins on a piece of leather falling here he actually put them on a carabiner when they were shipped and then you just clip it together just like that very simple I'm actually taking more time doing this to show you that it actually takes once you've done it a couple of times so then you have this and this is the top and it goes in exactly the same way just drop it in the slots just like that and put your pins of it I'm doing this without glasses on guys so you have to excuse me if it looks like I'm fumbling just a little bit to find the spot that these pins go in okay and then you have a back I've got a weed stuck in it there and the back just sits on there just like this exactly the same way you put two pins in there really only takes about three minutes to set this up if you're not trying to talk about while you do it then you have three holes that does rods go in pretty much the simplest way to do this is just take your rod and go ahead and put a clip through one of the holes in the rod and then slide the rod through the hole I'll start the bottom here and put the other clip in the other side so I'm just going to slide all three of these rods in one at a time then I'll put the other three clips in really a simple process probably should be ten to my fire behind me okay so there's one and we got two left so one goes here in this rod and one in the last rod at the bottom just like that and then your oven is done now it's not you know the most bulletproof thing in the world but it doesn't have to be it's not supposed to be you're not going to throw it around step on it you're going to sit it from your fire and you're going to put your cooking pan or your cooking tray or whatever you're cooking on right there on those on that grill and set it in front of your fire to convectively heat the food that you're cooking and we'll get it out here in just a few minutes once we get our fire right okay so let's talk about right here's our Camp cookery by Horace Kephart it's got our recipe in it we're going to break that down a little bit

I'm afraid because I think his recipe calls for a pretty large loaf of bread that we really don't have the capability of cooking we've got a measuring cup from our cup and bottle sets and we have water the other components that we're going to need are some flour I've got some whole wheat flour here we're need some salt and then we're going to need some grease either lard or bacon grease or bear grease he says in his book and I've taken the liberty to put this in the reflector oven and make it a little bit more liquefied he actually recommends stirring it in cold but I thought that was going to be a really much of a pain in the butt so I didn't sod not to do that now what I've got here

that I'm going to cook with is I've got two stainless steel dog dish bowls customs are a couple bucks apiece and I can use this this way to bake in or I can put them together I can put two of them together and I can just clip them shut with these paper clips like this to make kind of a what they call in the old days of Baker and they don't make those Baker's very much anymore at least I can't find what they do and that was just a long bread loaf size folded piece of metal that had a lid on it so it basically repeated itself on both sides just like our dog dishes to do except it was square or rectangular we don't have that luxury so we're going to use these dog dishes and improvised common man stuff see we can do with that that's another reason I said we're going to break our recipe down a little bit but we're only going to use one side of this in our reflector oven now the first thing that we're supposed to do is we're supposed to make sure that our pan is greased so what I think we're going to do is we will grease one pan we'll mix our ingredients in the other and to do that I'm just going to use a piece of rag or my hand whichever one comes up the Handy it's the fastest just happen to have a piece of linen over here we'll use that and I'm just going to pour some of this get this a little bit greasy and then I'm going to grease this pan so that our bread doesn't stick to the pan basically because the reason for that so I'm just going to rub that in there real good and a good light coating and set that to the sides and that's when we're going to cook in and then we'll use our other one for mixing now what Kephart says in his book is that one of the major mistakes that folks make when they're making bread is is they mess around too much with the ingredients and it causes the air to come out of the bread and from what I understand when you put the salt and the flour and the baking powder together and mix it up as soon as you add water to it it starts to release do a chemical reaction which releases water or excuse me releases air pockets into the bread and the more you knead that and roll it out and things like that it releases that air that compressed gas out of that loaf and it doesn't rise as well and it's not as fluffy so he recommends just stirring your ingredients with a wooden spoon and then just dumping it into whenever going to cook it in no messing around so that's what we're going to do okay so let's look at what he says here and what he says is you want three pints of flour we're going to cut this down into thirds so we're going to use one pint of flour and one point being I assume he's talking about volume there because his measuring devices would have been very similar to ours something that was probably measured in ounces except he probably didn't have a scale to wave volume way or the way weight like that so he just talked about things analysis so we're going to put a pint which is 16 ounces in our cup real quick of wheat flour and this is just regular straight-up wheat flour with no extras and you can buy this stuff pretty cheap or on the cheap from places like this is a hodgins mill here but you can get this stuff a lot of times at Dollar Stores places like that pretty cheap all right so that gives us our first ingredient of the wheat flour now let's talk about our next ingredient which is pretty simple it is three heaping teaspoons of baking powder we're going to use 1 and 1 teaspoon of salt so we use 1/3 so we'll put that in next we're going to use 1 and we're going to call this a tablespoon so we're just going to put about half of that in there just like that which should give us a teaspoon

and we're going to put a third of was that a teaspoon or a tablespoon we're going to put one teaspoon so we're gonna put one third of a teaspoon of salt in there just like that and we'll mix that up real quick in our cup okay now to that mix we're supposed to add our grease and this is where you have to do a little bit of work and that's why I made the grease a little bit more liquid than solid because Kephart says in this book you don't want to be a shirker on this part of the task in other words you don't want to be lazy about it or your bread is going to be what he calls sad you're going to have crappy bread basically so he's trying to tell you so we're going to take our oil here and it's calling for two heaping tablespoons of cold grease obviously our grease isn't cold so it's going to be hard to get two heaping tablespoons so we'll add a little extra for sake of purpose there and we're supposed to mix that first with our ingredients so that there's no lumps

and I would say that's going to absorb pretty quickly in there probably part of the reason that he suggested using cold grease instead of hot but you can see the lumps there push those off and mix those in see that and he said that like I said don't be a shirker on this portion of it because you need this to be well mixed so we'll just keep cutting those up and chopping them around and moving them until we get it mixed in there now his next ingredient is water and he suggests that you put the water in cold and he says a scanty pint of cold water he actually calls for one scant

pint of cold water which means you know a scant means not quite a pint or write out a pint of cold water we're cutting this in thirds so in our measuring system our point is 16 ounces so we're going to put about three ounces or a little bit more in there so we'll have our scanty 1/3 begin with our measuring cup here convenience of having those measurement markers in there the first mark is 15 ounces on here so I'm having to eyeball it just a little bit but I'll be able to look at the dough itself we know what dough is supposed to look like so it shouldn't be too tough now I think at this point we're going to go to a bigger stirring spoon we're going to go to more of a spatula type spoon here and mix this up real real good to get where we want to be before we put this in the oven and hopefully by the time we get this down our fire is going to be right remember what he said he said the more you mess with this the worse off you are so we really just want to get this whipped up as fast as we can into a dough and not do a lot of messing around if we can help it and you can see that it's sticking together pretty good right now so we probably don't have quite enough water in there

we're not soaking up all the dry either so we'll put just a shade more water in there a lot of cooking is eyeballing things for anybody who does it whether it's your grandmother or Horace Kephart you know a pinch of this a dash of that you know a person that knew what that was was the person doing the cooking so we're going to do the best we can here and get at least all of the mixture that's dry wet and get ourselves some kind of a doughy batter that we can cook and see how it turns out we should have a loaf of wheat bread when we're done okay the guys off its kind of scooch this around a little bit in this pan to make it kind of a cylinder padding a little bit straighten it out and now we're just going to transfer it to our cooking pan just like that roll it over in there do the same thing just kind of flatten out a little bit in there and then we're going to put it right on our baking rack

I'm just going to flatten it out to take up the entire surface here at the bottom of this just like this I think the more you mess with this to worse off you're going to be according to mr. Kephart so all I want to do is get this thing flattened out

so it's thinner it will click gotcha ready for the oven all right guys so we've got our fire cooking here spread it out a little bit and I may need to feed it a little bit but I'm gonna go ahead and get this in front of it first and I'm just going to set this pretty close to the edge of my fire pit and let that heat want to get it on even ground if I can prop it up with a stick here something on the one side there we go and now I'm just going to let it cook and it's probably going to take 25 minutes so I get the fire fed up and we'll see how she goes okay guys we're just speeding the fire slow and cooking it slow takes about 25 minutes according to cat parts writing so we're going to find out this one to keep you abreast of the situation I've added a little more wood to the fire to get some flames going there get that reflector heated up and about halfway through he says to turn the pan 180 degrees so we're going to turn that pan 180 degrees and I'll show you how we test to see if the bread is done when we get to that point okay guys I've got the fire burnt down pretty much two coals and just a little bit of wood on top looking really nice really really hot in there if you can see the heat waves in there on the camera or not but I can sure see them and I want to touch that pan a second ago because it's about ready turn and I'm telling you right now thing is hot now no doubt is cooking

okay so we've been cooking for about 25 minutes here and according to cat parts directions plenty hot for sure I let the fire die down quite a bit now you poke a stick in here and if it comes out clean and not doughy your bread should be done so I'm going to poke it down a couple of spots and see what we got

looks like it's coming out dry all the way around I've turned it one and a half times yeah pretty dry so I'd say we're probably pretty close to done I'm going to pull it off the fire we'll check it out

okay guys well I'm sure that our breads probably still hot without a doubt here select your Evans cooled down a little bit too bad I flipped it over in there to help it cool down just a little bit now you don't want to slice fresh bread with a knife you know the proper way is to break pieces off just like that and mmm might be just a little bit of dough enos to it in there but it's not bad nor are fun yeah now some good wheat bread got a nice fluff to it in there it looks really good

turned out great now Kephart says that obviously if you leave the spread out it's going to harden up and what he would do is he would store this in a muslin sack and put it back in the reflector oven just on the rack and sprinkled water on top of very similar to what you'd do with like rolls or biscuits that started to get stale and you're covered in a microwave and that convection will moisten it back up and make it good to eat again for at least a day or two you know as far as the ingredients go for this bread obviously you know even in the 18th century they bought provisions that they carried with them and kept part gives the list of provisions that he carried with him and hunting parties and camps and things like that

like staple items being a bread flour cornmeal cornstarch baking powder salt sugar coffees things like that and there are obviously natural replacements for this stuff in the woods you can make your flower from acorns you can make it from the root of the cattail but they didn't bother doing that stuff they bought those provisions that took them with them and that's kind of what we need to emulate and think about today we don't want to put ourself at the mercy of trying to find acorns to make flour when it's so easy to carry it with us but if you just carry simple provisions like I said flour coffee sugar salt things like that it's very easy to make a lot of good meals hearty robust meals out of those things along with some dry goods we're going to talk about that as we go through this camp cooking series like I said this is the old Scout reflector oven it's really nice I'll put a link to his website on this video I think the retail prices of stove is about 65 bucks and it folds right up into this haversack if you were carrying a Pathfinder haversack you could stick it right down in there I've got slid right down the front of my Duluth bushcraft pack in front of the garbage can

and there's no weight to it I don't even know it's there but it gives me something handy to cook with you know they carried quite a bit of stuff with them for cooking because they wanted to eat and they want to eat good so we're going to talk about the different implements that he carried what he did with them as well as some of the other frontiersman and pioneers of the 18th and 19th century okay guys want Dave camp at fire school I appreciate you join me for the video out here at the Pathfinder school I thank you for your views for your comments for your support for everything that you do for me for my family for all my affiliates and all my friends at the Pathfinder school we'll be back to another video since McCann thanks a lot guys

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