Bake Bread While Camping with the Coleman Camp Oven
Morgan Rogue 11.01.22
I have wanted this Coleman Camp Oven since I first realized it existed years ago.
I love to bake. I have cast iron and know how to bake bread inside of a dutch oven, but more often than not, I am not in a position where I can do that while out adventuring.
While this oven isn’t made for backpacking, it can certainly work for emergency preparedness, RVing and car camping.
One really nice thing about this oven is that it folds down so it can store pretty much anywhere.
It’s very easy to unfold and make it ready for action, takes about 2 minutes and that’s just me taking my sweet time.
I decided to test it out with some homemade rolls. First, I needed to let it get to temp. I used my Coleman Camp Stove that uses propane. I tried not to make it too hot and did a medium-high temperature to make sure that it heated within a reasonable amount of time.
It took about 30 minutes to reach almost 350 degrees. I needed to get it to 375 according to the recipes but it never made it there. After 30 minutes of pre-heating I needed to get it in the oven, I couldn’t use much more propane just for the pre-heating portion.
When I opened the door, of course, a lot of the heat escaped. In fact, there are already a lot of vent holes in the oven. Venting is necessary for proper baking, but I do think it could still work with less holes. I hear there’s something you could place over it to help retain the heat, but I don’t think that’s necessary. Venting while baking in this manner is important.
When I placed the rolls in and closed the door again, the temperature gauge showed a very low temp and after that, the gauge never reached 300 degrees again. As soon as I put the rolls in, I set a timer for 30 minutes, that was the appropriate baking time needed for these rolls.
Even after 30 minutes, the temperature gauge still never reached 300 degrees, but…
It baked!
It baked them perfectly. I couldn’t have asked for a better result. It was as if I baked them in my oven at home.
Outside of the temperature gauge potentially not working properly, it baked like it should.
This is best when used over a propane source, even if it’s a Black Stone type of setup. I wouldn’t use this over a fire, but maybe coals if they were hot enough, but don’t place this directly on the coals, place it on a grate over the coals.
I will have to play with this a bit more in the future because of the temperature gauge either not reading correctly or…I’m not sure what the issue is there. But regardless, it worked according to the time needed to bake and in my book, that’s a success.
I’m really happy to have this as we store a lot of propane for emergencies and tend to use our Coleman Camp Stove a lot when we go camping so this will be a fun addition to our adventures because now we can bake!
It has been wavering between $49 and $59, so I’d wait to get it until you see it at $49, but regardless, you can check out the Coleman Camp Oven for yourself and add the joy of almost-effortless baking to your camping itinerary.
