camp meals

Camp Dutch Oven Sourdough

Four ingredients, one long wait, and a lid full of coals. Bread at a car campsite.

calories
250
weight
2.7 oz
cal / oz
93
protein
8 g
serves
8, scales
prep
30 min
cook
50 min
total time
80 min
water
360 ml cold
cost
$

Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.

  • Dinner
  • Lunch
  • Dutch oven
  • Campfire coals
  • Car camping
  • Basecamp
  • Canoe / raft
  • Vegetarian
  • Vegan
  • Dairy free
  • Nut free
  • One pot
  • Pre-mix at home
  • Day one only
  • Actual cooking

Ingredients

Active sourdough starter 100 g about 1/2 cup, fed and bubbling before you leave home
Warm water 360 g about 1 1/2 cups
Bread flour 500 g about 4 cups, premeasured into a bag
Fine salt 12 g 2 tsp
Rice flour 2 tbsp for dusting the proofing cloth

Method

  1. Stir the starter into the water in your largest pot or a bowl. Add the flour and salt and work it together by hand. It will look torn and lumpy. That is correct.
  2. Cover with a towel and leave it an hour, somewhere out of direct sun.
  3. Over the next two hours, do four rounds of stretch and fold, thirty minutes apart. Wet your hand, lift one edge of the dough, stretch it up, fold it over the middle. Turn the bowl a quarter and repeat four times per round.
  4. Cover and let it rise until it has grown by half and the surface is domed and slack. In warm weather that is four hours. In cold weather it can be twelve.
  5. Shape it into a tight ball, set it seam-up in a cloth dusted heavily with rice flour, and leave it overnight in the coolest corner of camp.
  6. Build a fire and burn it down to coals. Set the empty dutch oven in the coals with the lid on for fifteen minutes to preheat.
  7. Turn the loaf seam-down into the hot pot, slash the top once with a knife, and put the lid on. Shovel coals onto the lid.
  8. Bake 25 minutes covered. Pull the coals off the lid, take the lid off, and bake 20 to 25 minutes more until the crust is dark. Cool it on the pot lid for half an hour before cutting.

This is a home loaf moved outdoors with almost nothing changed, because sourdough was already a camping recipe before anyone called it one. Flour, salt, and water are shelf-stable. The only living thing you carry is the starter, and a fed starter holds fine in a jar for a day or two without cold. Nothing here needs a fridge, a mixer, or a thermometer.

The long timeline is the whole method. Fermentation does the work an oven cannot, and the overnight rest in cool night air is what gives the crumb structure and the crust its color. Budget the schedule backward from when you want to eat: mix in the afternoon, shape at dusk, bake after breakfast. A preheated pot matters more than the exact coal count, because the trapped steam from the dough itself is what lets the loaf spring before the crust sets.

Packing

Weigh the flour and salt together into a bag at home. Carry the starter in a jar with the lid resting on, not screwed down, or it will build pressure in the car. Rice flour goes in a film canister.

Variations

  • Skip the overnight cold proof and bake the same evening. The crumb is tighter and the flavor is flatter, but it is still bread.
  • Fold in a handful of chopped dried olives or rosemary during the last stretch and fold.
  • No dutch oven: bake it in a foil-lined pot with a foil lid and expect a paler crust.

https://www.lodgecastiron.com/blogs/recipe/combo-cooker-sourdough-loaf

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