Corn Cake Camp Breakfast
Cornmeal pancakes and powdered-egg scramble off one skillet, with bacon-fat potatoes if you have the time.
- calories
- 720
- weight
- 7.5 oz
- cal / oz
- 96
- protein
- 24 g
- serves
- 4, scales
- prep
- 10 min
- cook
- 25 min
- total time
- 35 min
- water
- 400 ml boiled
- cost
- $$
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Breakfast
- Campfire coals
- Grill grate
- Canister stove
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- Canoe / raft
- Nut free
- One pot
- Pre-mix at home
- Shelf stable
- Basic
Ingredients
| All-purpose flour | 1 cup | |
|---|---|---|
| Yellow cornmeal | 1/2 cup | |
| Sugar | 2 tbsp | |
| Baking powder | 3 tsp | |
| Salt | 1/2 tsp | plus a pinch for the eggs |
| Powdered whole milk | 1/3 cup | stands in for the milk and half-and-half |
| Ghee or shortening | 1/4 cup | ghee does not need a cooler |
| Powdered whole eggs | 1 cup | reconstitutes to about eight eggs |
| Sour cream powder | 2 tbsp | |
| Freeze-dried chives | 2 tbsp | |
| Onion powder | 1 tbsp | 1 tsp for the eggs, the rest for the potatoes |
| Garlic powder | 2 tbsp | potatoes only |
| Dehydrated hash brown potatoes | 3 cups | |
| Shelf-stable bacon crumbles | 1/2 cup | the precooked kind in a pouch |
| Dried minced onion | 3 tbsp | |
| Olive oil | 6 tbsp | |
| Black pepper | to taste |
Method
- Cover the hash browns with boiling water in a lidded pot and leave them alone for ten minutes. Drain hard. Wet potatoes will not brown.
- Heat 4 tbsp of the oil in the skillet over medium coals. Add the dried onion and the drained potatoes, then the garlic powder, remaining onion powder, salt, and pepper. Spread flat and leave them for five minutes before turning.
- Turn, cover, and cook another ten minutes on lower heat. Uncover, turn once more, stir in the bacon crumbles, and let the edges brown for five minutes. Tip into a bowl and cover.
- Whisk the egg powder, sour cream powder, chives, onion powder, and salt with about 300 ml of cool water. Let it sit two minutes so the powder hydrates fully.
- Wipe the skillet, melt a spoon of ghee, and pour in the eggs. Keep pushing them toward the middle over medium heat until they are set but still glossy. Move them off the fire early; they keep cooking.
- Stir the milk powder into the premixed flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, and salt, then cut in the rest of the ghee with your fingers until it looks like coarse sand. Add water a splash at a time to a thick, pourable batter.
- Oil the skillet lightly and pour out roughly 1/3 cup per cake. Flip when the edges dull and bubbles hold open. Cook the second side about two minutes.
The original is a fridge recipe: fresh eggs, half-and-half, sour cream, raw potatoes, a pound of bacon. Every one of those has a dry equivalent that behaves the same way, so the swaps are powdered milk for the cream, egg and sour cream powder for the eggs, dehydrated hash browns for the raw spuds, and precooked bacon crumbles for the strips. Ghee replaces butter because it does not need cold and does not scorch as fast.
Order matters more than technique here. Potatoes take the longest and hold heat the longest, so they go first and sit covered while the eggs and cakes cook in the same skillet. The cornmeal is what keeps the cakes from going gummy without buttermilk, and the fat cut into the dry mix gives them a short, crumbly edge instead of a rubbery one.
Packing
Bag the pancake dry mix as one unit and the egg powders as another, both labeled with their water amounts. Ghee goes in a screw-top jar. Potatoes, bacon, and the potato seasonings share a third bag.
Variations
- Skip the potatoes and this fits one pan and twenty minutes.
- Leftover cakes wrapped around the eggs travel fine in a pocket for lunch.
https://www.hunttalk.com/threads/breakfast.216009