On a day I took off from rock climbing earlier this week, I followed through on a plan I made a long time ago: making bread on a campfire using a cast iron pot. I’d baked other things on campfires before, but I’d never tried to make a loaf.

The procedure I used roughly followed the no-knead bread recipes that use a cast-iron pot in an oven, so all I had to do was make sure the dough would rise properly in colder conditions and make sure the pot could get hot enough on top and on bottom to mimic an oven indoors.

I started the night before the baking by mixing a little more than 2 cups of bread flour with 1 cup of water in a 2-gallon Ziploc bag, adding some extra flour to the super-goopy dough. I let that mixture sit for around a half-hour–a technique called autolyze that allows the flour to hydrate evenly and some gluten development to happen before kneading. I then added in a 1 and 1/2 tsp of salt, 1 tsp of instant yeast, and another handful of flour (the dough was looking too loose). Kneading consisted of squeezing and pulling the bag as best I could, though I eventually figured that I was never going to get as good of a kneading process as I could back home. I then set my bag in my car overnight to mimic an overnight rise in the refrigerator.

The next day, I took the dough out and tried to get it to warm up and rise, eventually putting it in my down jacket to get it closer to room temperature.

After a few hours, I decided it was time to shape the dough. I cut open the ziploc and covered both sides of the dough with flour. To shape it, I just folded it in upon itself four times, forward, backward, and side to side.

I then covered two paper towels with steel cut oats (I had to improvise, as I didn’t take any cornmeal or semolina with me) and put the dough on top. To proof the dough, I put the whole kit and caboodle in a bowl and then in my steel pot, put the lid on, and set it in the sun. I hoped the pot would collect some rays of sun and provide some radiant heat to keep the dough at a good temperature.

While the dough proofed, I built up my cook-fire. I’d started the fire much earlier in the day, and so I tried to keep some of the coals hot by building a sort of oven with some cinder blocks that were lying around the campsite. I doubt it worked, but it made me feel like I wasn’t wasting quite as much wood.

When the dough got closer to ready for baking, around 1 hour after I began proofing, I started building up the fire again to get it hot enough to warm the pot before tossing the dough in.

Once the fire was hot enough, I placed my dutch oven in the center of the coals to pre-heat, reserving some coals for the top of the pot. I also built a second fire to the side of the first in order to supply fresh coals at regular intervals during baking.

When the pot was fully heated, I took the dough out of the proofing pot and flipped it into the hot dutch-oven. I then covered the top with coals from the second fire.

After peeking in a number of times, I noticed that even though the loaf was getting cooked inside, the top of the loaf wasn’t browning, so I built a fire right on top of the pot.

Once the top was browned, I decided it was time to take the loaf out and see how it looked and felt. It was sounding hollow when I knocked on the top, so that was a good sign. Including the last few minutes, when the loaf was only really cooking from the top and not the bottom, the actual baking process took around an hour and 10 to an hour and 15 minutes.

The loaf was browned on top, but not on bottom, and the dough had risen somewhat, but not as much as I might have liked in a perfect situation. The steel-cut oats, however, proved to work perfectly–I’ll be using them again on my next loaf. The crumb, when I cut into the loaf, was predictably squashed and slightly under-cooked, but the bread still tasted pretty darn good.

I think that next time, I wouldn’t mess with the ratios of ingredients (maybe less salt…), but I would like to make the crumb less dense by allowing the dough to rise and proof longer (or maybe in a warmer environment) and by getting the dutch-oven much hotter before putting the dough in to produce a better oven-spring effect. This would mean building much larger primary and secondary fires and building the fire on the top of the pot much sooner instead of just relying on coals for the top.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with the result of my first dutch-oven loaf!