Meal of the Week: Pesto Knots
When you are about 30 minutes from your campsite, take a break on the trail and mix up your dough. Add the water to the yeast and sugar in a zip lock bag and let sit for about 5 minutes. Ideally, you have a sunny rock you can put the starter on to warm up. After the five minutes you should notice some foam in the bag. That is the yeast getting going. Add the flour into the ziplock bag and kneed carefully so you don’t break the bag. Once the dough has started to form and it is pulling away from the bag, take the dough out of the ziplock and kneed a little longer in your hands or on another larger plastic bag. Once it seems that all the flour has been well combined, put it back into the ziplock bag and throw it in your pack for the remainder of the hike.
Once back in camp, you can take out your dough, and divide the dough into about 6 pieces. Each piece should be flattened into a small round pancake about 3-4 inches in diameter. Put about a teaspoon of pesto in the middle and wrap it up, pinching the dough together to make a ball. Place all 6 pesto knots in the pan and set up your oven. If you are patient, it is best to let the knots rise for 20 more minutes before baking. I am usually not patient, and they still turn out great, though a little more dense. Bake for about 30 minutes. You should start to smell the bread baking after about 20 minutes. If you have left over pesto, I spread a little on top of the hot knots. Enjoy!
Gear Corner
I have been baking for years in the back country. By far the best baking system I have ever used is called the Outback Oven by Backpackers Pantry. While it certainly does not fit in to the Ultralight system(9.5oz in addition to the rest of your pot and stove kit), it is very light weight and works very well. I am currently working on a lighter version of the Outback Oven
Backing with three tea light candles, just did not work. It got hot enough to create a great environment to rise the dough, but not hot enough to bake. I switched over to a tea light alcohol stove with only 1/4 oz of alcohol. I burned that off, then let the whole set up sit for 5 minutes to keep baking. Then I pulled everything apart and put another 1/4 oz of fuel in the stove and cooked again. In the end it did work, but the stove still got too hot and started burning the “oven” a bit. I have some modifications in mind to try and make this system work, so I will report back in a few weeks and let you know what progress I made.
Tip of the Week
Often you want small ziplock bags for yeast or sugar or spices. To make small ziplock bags at home, take a snack size ziplock and cut it in half. I use packing tape to seal up the cut end and now I have a small ziplock!
Enjoy your time out on the trail!
Dustin
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