Steam Baking With Silicone Cups
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OK, I know this has been covered here before several times, but I had good results and wanted to share my experience. I carry a pretty minimal cook kit, consisting of a Ti wing Esbit stove, a titanium windscreen and an 850mL pot. I don't cook anything more complicated than ramen or pasta sides or heating water for coffee in the morning. I'm not willing to add much (if any) weight or complexity to my cook kit to steam bake, but if I could do it with my existing gear, then that would be a nice bonus. Turns out that it works, and I only added 0.8 oz and a single item to my cook kit.
I first tried using some silicone baking cups with feet as referenced here, and while it worked, they made a pretty pathetically small muffin, small enough that it didn't seem worth the effort. Another round with Amazon and I found these 4" diameter cups which make a much bigger and more satisfying muffin. Much better.
I first tested the system on a canister stove, and made a delicious fluffy muffin after about ten minutes of steaming. Perfect- that's just about exactly how long I can boil water on a single Esbit tab. So I tried it again with my tiny Ti wing stove and windscreen. The recipe I used is just as lazy as my typical backpacking dinners:
2.5 oz Bisquick
0.5 oz Nido instant milk
A handful of raisins and a touch of cinnamon
(All of this stuff will be pre-mixed at home in a single ziplock.)
Then just enough water to make a sticky dough ball.I put a spoonful of coconut oil in the bottom of the baking cup first, but I don't think that's necessary other than to add a few more calories to the muffin. The mix then goes into the baking cup. The cup should be just over half full or the muffin will spill out over the top when it cooks.
You'll need something to keep the baking cup off the bottom of your pot; I folded a piece of aluminum foil onto itself a number of times and made a 5/8" x 6" long strip that I bent into a coil, but some small rocks from your campsite would work just as well. I put the baking cup on top of this in my pot, and added a little less than an inch of water. This went on my stove with a 14g Esbit tab, which brought the water to a boil in about 2-3 minutes and burned for another 12 minutes after that. The muffin was done after 9-10 minutes, but I just let the whole tab go to see if I could leave it unsupervised in camp, and it worked out fine. So I can set it up, go do something else for 15 minutes, and come back to a freshly baked muffin.
I came back a few minutes later, and was rewarded with a perfectly baked muffin. The muffin pops easily out of the silicone cup with basically no clean-up afterwards.
I was quite pleased with how easy this turned out to be. Like I said before, I wasn't willing to accept much complexity or weight to gain the ability to steam bake. But for $11 and 0.8 oz of weight and total compatibility with my minimalist cookset, it's a no brainer.
Future baking plans include:
Bisquick biscuit with cheddar cheese and a tuna packet in the middle
Cornbread (w/precooked bacon, cheddar cheese?)
Chocolate fudge brownies
Yellow cake w/Nutella on top
Trader Joe's mixed berry scone mixSteam baking is the fastest way to cook bread. It is easy and simple to do and is great if you don't need to have a brown crust.
That being said, I don't mind waiting an hour if I can have a crispy pizza on the trail (Crabtree Meadow, August 2014).
Jon, as usual your trail food looks amazing. I'm still in awe of the cheeseburger you made at GGG.
This isn't exactly steam baking, but shows what you can do with a wood stove and a few pots:
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