10 Ways to Cook Bread Over Campfire + Super Easy Bread Recipe! (Ultimate Camping/Survival Superfood)

Luke here at the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel. Today we're going to show you how to make bread on a campfire. We're going to show you lots of different techniques. We're going to show you lots of different recipes. It's going to be easier than you think and taste real good. All right, let's get to it. Warning, this video is not keto friendly. Not many people think of bread as a camping food, but it is a fabulous camping food. Its ingredients are non-perishable and super light. This small bag of dry ingredients is enough to make a large loaf of bread and a big meal for me. Now I know a lot of you out there are intimidated by making bread. Bread making can be complicated, but it can also be extremely basic. So let me give you the most basic recipe to get you started. Bread flour, sugar, salt, yeast, and water. Now first you pour some bread flour into a bowl, make a little hole in the middle and fill that hole with a little bit of yeast, a pinch of sugar, and a little dash of salt around the edge. Fill that hole with warm water, mix it with your finger and give it about five minutes or until it looks all frothy and bubbly. Mix that all up and keep adding a little bit of water at a time until you get a nice sticky dough that you can still form into a ball. You want it sticky enough that it sticks to your fingers and the counter, but dry enough that it can actually be formed into a ball. Pound, stretch, and roll that dough until it starts to set up and get stretchy. It'll dry up and no longer stick to your fingers or the counter, and you'll be able to stretch it apart and see through it. It's called window painting. If you can stretch it enough that you can see light through it, then you've kneaded it enough. Once that's done, cover it and let it sit for one hour or until it's doubled in size. Then you know it's ready to bake. You can use it immediately or you can stick it in the fridge and save it to take it camping or use it another day. 10 hours later you can see it's doubled in size in the fridge. If the dough gets warm or you leave it in the fridge for more than three days, it'll just slowly become sourdough starter and you can use it just like you would any other sourdough starter. You can make sourdough pancakes, you can add flour and water to it to make a sourdough bread. It's great. Now I've kneaded and mixed dough out in the field plenty of times, but if you want some shortcuts, here's one. You can add water and all your ingredients to a plastic bag and knead it in the bag. It makes life a lot easier, a lot less mess. Once the dough is set up a little bit, you can pull it out of the bag and finish kneading it by hand. Or you can combine all the ingredients together, stir it once or twice by hand and chuck it into a bag and let it sit for 8 to 10 hours and it will combine, mix thoroughly and the yeast will get activated all by itself. You can do this in the field or do it the night before you leave on your campout and have dough ready to go the next morning. Alright, I brought some doughs that I made yesterday. This is the one I just added all the ingredients together and let it mix in the bag and this is the one I spent all the time kneading and they're really, really similar. Look at the nice stretch that's developed overnight. Looking good. Hey Jacob! Hey babe! Jacob! Look, I've got Jacob and Becca with me. Alright guys, now I'm going to show you how to cook bread over fire using a stick. Feel the heat of the fire with your hand and the spot where you can hold your hand for just about the count of three but no longer, that's about 375 degrees. That's where you want to be cooking your bread. Take a glob of bread, not too much, roll it into a snake. Skewer one part of the snake way down here and then wrap it around the end and skewer it on the end like that. You want to be able to see a little bit of the stick poking through between the wraps, just like that. Just kind of keep it in a slow heat and just keep rotating it every once in a while. Let it cook thoroughly. Becca's just painting, Jacob's playing in the water, I'm baking bread. This is a lovely day. Alright, this is looking pretty done. Let's take it over here. You guys going to help me eat some bread? This is the sweet cinnamon butter from Texas Roadhouse. It comes with their rolls. Is it too hot? We're going to put some of this sweet cinnamon butter all over this. Do I just bite into it? Go bite into it, like corn on the cob. Is that like the most delicious bread you've ever tasted? I'll tell you, the worst bread recipe tastes better fresh than the best bread recipe tastes cold. Nothing beats fresh hot bread. Now if you guys don't want to make your own bread from scratch, you can do the same trick with the pre-made doughs and I like to use the pre-made cinnamon rolls. Just unwind the cinnamon rolls, wrap them around the stick and then use the frosting in the can and it just, it's a really great breakfast snack when you're camping. Alright, we're going to cook some bread in the Dutch oven. I'm going to make biscuits with sharp cheddar cheese inside. It's going to be good. You got a block of sharp cheddar here. We're going to take a little bit of cheddar. I'm going to fold that up in there. Seven little dough balls with a block of cheddar cheese inside. You want to preheat your Dutch oven but you want to make sure the temperature isn't too high. Sprinkle a little bit of flour in the Dutch oven and if the flour smokes, it's too hot. Yeah, that's too hot. We're gonna let that cool down a little bit. So we just peek at it every five minutes or so to make sure they're not browning up too quickly. Oh, those are looking good. What do you think of that? They look and smell good. Oh, is the cheese all melted? Yeah, it's so good. It's perfect. There you go. Fresh warm biscuits with melted cheddar cheese inside. Crunchy on the outside, gooey and cheesy in the middle. That's good. I gotta stop eating. I'm gonna fill up too fast. I got a lot of stuff to film. Flatbreads are hands down the easiest breads to cook over a campfire and there's lots of different ways you can do it. If you guys watch my channel, you've seen me do a lot of survival camping and winter camping and often I'll use the back of my avalanche shovel in the winter time to cook flatbreads. It's a great trick and works really well. But if you have a large smooth rock or a flat rock, you can also use that and it works perfectly well. But I got a little cast iron skillet here so I'm gonna do a fun flatbread recipe. I'm gonna make Navajo tacos. I got a little corn oil here but you can also use canola, peanut, vegetable, whatever. We're just gonna grab some bread dough and spread it out into a disc. Do it like you're making a tiny pizza. There we go. Nice bit of flatbread. All right, let's test our oil and see if it's hot enough. Nope, not yet. We got our disc of bread here. We're gonna put it right in there. Now if you want to pull these out of the skillet and smother them in honey butter and fried bacon, it is one of the most amazing breakfast ever. Taco seasoning. Oh, that smells good. There we go. Navajo tacos. Thank you. This looks so good. What do you think? Do you like that? If you really want to show off, you can make campfire pizza and you don't need a dutch oven to do it. You can use this same dough recipe and just sandwich it between two shallow cookie sheets using a pair of c-clamps. Just put some coals top and bottom on there and bam, you have the most amazing campfire pizza. So delicious. Oh yeah, that's a good crust. I'm proud of that. If you're in the woods and you want to bake a proper loaf of bread and you don't have any utensils or cooking gear at all, you can build a stone bread oven. Then go and build a roaring fire in there and let it burn for like 20-30 minutes at least. Get all those rocks nice and hot. Do a nice stiff dough that'll hold a ball shape and let it bake for about 15 minutes or until it's nice and golden brown. That will make you a delicious, chewy, crunchy crust loaf of bread. It's absolutely delicious. One of the most primitive, simple ways to cook a loaf of bread is to cook it in the gray fire ash. Get yourself a nice stiff dough and roll it into a ball and bury that dough. Make sure there's hot coals all around it and let it bake for about 15 minutes and then just pull it out, dust it off, and it's good to eat. Don't worry about the fire ash. It won't hurt you. It's completely sanitary and it tastes just like flour. By the way, you can also cook steaks just by laying them on the coals. Works really well. The coals will stick to the steak when you first put it on, but once the steak is done, the coals fall right off. If you want to make awesome campfire donuts, just take this dough, roll it into rings, deep fry it in some peanut oil, and then roll it around in some powdered sugar as soon as you pull it out of the oil. Eat it hot and it is absolutely amazing. This is something we've made a couple times on campouts and it's great. Another great way to cook bread over an open fire is to steam it. And so I'm going to take some of this dough and I'm going to make some sweet pork steamed buns. So I've got this little doohickey right here and it's a steamer tray. I got some shredded pork here. I cooked this slowly for about eight hours in a bunch of root beer and spices, so it's really sweet. Take a nice big glob of that. All right, we'll just let that steam for about 15 minutes. See, it's just like a normal bun in the middle. Oh, all this pork goodness came out. No, it's actually pretty good. Steaming is a great way to cook a lot of things over an open fire. You can cook muffins, brownies, bread pudding, cakes. You can buy those Just Add Water muffin mixes in the store. Put some of it into a metal cup, put a flat rock in the bottom of your pot, and just rest that cup on top of the rock so it's not on the bottom. Put the lid on and just let it steam. It's a great way to cook muffins using equipment you've already got. Another way to cook bread is to boil it. We're going to make some dumplings. Well, if you ever got a can of soup and you want to make it a little bit more hearty, add some dumplings to it. A little extra water in there. All right, we'll just get that boiling. You know, you guys might not know this, but my wife has actually got a little website where you can buy her paintings. I'll put a link in the description below. Thank you. Oh, that's that's going. All right. All right. Once your soup's boiling, take little chunks of dough just like that. Just drop them in there. Once you got the dumplings in there, just let it boil for about four or five minutes. You're ready to eat. Nice hearty bowl of chicken noodle soup with a bunch of bread dumplings in it. There you go. Your soup's gone from something that'll barely whet your appetite to a hearty meal. All with the same bread dough. Becca, did you enjoy that food? I loved it all. Good. If you guys want to see more campfire cooking videos, we've got a ton of them. I'll put a link in the video description below. If you guys want to see our camping trips, we have over 70 camping trips in our camping adventure playlist. Check it out. We put out new videos every Saturday morning, so don't forget to click subscribe. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, don't forget to check out the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel where we have hundreds of videos just like this. 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