There are times when the distances are short, the summer evenings are long and the craving for fresh bread or pizza or brownies overwhelms the desire for an ultralight pack. That’s when the backcountry ovens shine!

I’m not talking heavy cast iron Dutch oven here. We’ve got a 10-inch Outback Oven, weighing in at 450 grams. The oven consists of a small metal heat disperser, a non-stick pan and aluminum lid, temperature gauge, and a heat-reflecting, collapsible cover. There is also a 12-inch version of the oven and an ultralight model (where you use your own pot and lid).

When the recipe is ready to cook, we simply fire up our stove (a MSR Dragonfly – the Outback Oven doesn’t work on stoves with the canister directly below the burner, only on those with the fuel tank off to the side), put the heat disperser plate over the flame, settle the non-stick pan with dough on top of the heat disperser, add the lid (and screw-on temperature gauge), and top the works with the shiny silver cover.

Now comes the careful watch and to be truthful, sometimes long wait. The temperature gauge doesn’t come in degrees – Centigrade or Fahrenheit – it comes in preheat, bake and burn. Best results are usually found in the upper end of bake. Turn your back and let the gauge creep up to burn and you’ll be sorry. To adjust the baking temperature, keep your stove cranked as low as possible. Sometimes just pulling the collapsible hood off for a second or two will bring the temperature back down to bake from burn.

You can buy special mixes pre-packaged and ready to use for the oven, buy supermarket packages for brownies, etc., or adapt “from scratch” recipes of your own. We enjoy simple pizzas made by smothering Naan bread (an Indian flatbread) with pesto or tomato sauce, cheeses, olives, and sausage. My daughter’s specialty is a cookie cake – her own chocolate chip cookie recipe making one big, thick cookie cake! My niche is taking a basic baking powder biscuit recipe and making cheese/dill loaf or cinnamon buns or fruit loaf with rehydrated strawberries.

The only way to tell that your baking is done is to lift the lid and have a look. Timing is variable (particularly if it’s a windy day), but the end results are always (now that we’ve learned the importance of constant temperature vigilance) spectacular.

If you’ve got a favourite Outback Oven recipe you’d like to share, feel free to drop a note in the Hiking and Backpacking Forum.