Hey guys!
I went on a canoe trip with the Boy Scouts in Canada and came across the Bakepacker as part of the gear they give you. I cannot for the life of me find them anywhere. I’m looking at manufacturing a run of them but I can’t find information about the original makers. Does anyone have any information about it?
The BakePacker camp cooking device was discontinued some years ago. But this is what it looked like:
I backpacked regularly for 20 years and never attempted to cook food this “boil in bag” way so I am puzzled why the Scouts would be using it. There are better ways to prepare food in the wilds. (maybe it worked well with poutine, eh?)
Is it really baking? It’s cooking with steam, so the temperature never gets to “bake” temperatures, but maybe 230F or a little over 100C, right? Who cares? You can cook up some tasty foods and it certainly won’t dry out the food.
I know a fellow that does the same thing with an improvised double boiler setup. He has two pots that nest one inside the other. The larger pot gets some water and spacers on the bottom. Then the food to be cooked (he was making some kind of Jiffy mix muffin when I saw him do it) goes into the smaller pot and the smaller pot goes into the larger pot, put the cover on and cook away. Seems kind of similar to what the bakepacker would do, and produced a moist, tasty, “baked” product.
Am I the only person that expected the bakepacker accessory to be some kind of pot smoking device for back packers?
For 30 years I have always called my camp baking device a bakepacker but it doesn’t look like that at all. Turns out I use an Outback Oven and just called it the wrong thing. Corn bread cinnamon rolls and cookies are my go to.
I’ve played around at home with steam baking and it works fine. The only difference with dry heat baking is that the food doesn’t brown - looks a little funny, but tastes fine.
Nesting pans designed for camping actually work great. You do need to cover the inside pan to prevent condensation from dripping into the food and making it soggy. I used aluminum foil, but a baking bag would probably work (something else to experiment with). I’ve done corn bread, cake, and brownies, and it worked fine. The brownies are especially moist and chewy. Never done yeast bread, but it should work - might look funny without the browning. Have yet to try it in camp (always bring my Dutch oven) but it should work fine. You don’t need a fancy rack - you could even use a couple of small rocks to elevate the inner pan.
I believe that’s weedwhacker, not bakepacker. 
I worked in several wilderness sports outfitter shops during the big boom in backpacking during the 1970’s and we sold a huge range of camp stoves and several gadgets to enable baking in the backcountry. Most had some sort of heat distributing platform over the stove and an enclosure to trap heat around the sides and top of the cookware – no steaming involved.
I tested some of them myself (tried to always do that so I could report honestly to customers on how well they worked). I’d usually do a test run on my porch at home (not wanting to screw up precious ingredients I humped into the mountains) and the results for things like pizza, biscuits, brownies were pretty good. Tried a birthday cake once with less than satisfactory outcome (raw batter in the middle with a burnt crust) but that was probably from using my roaring Phoebus “white gas” winter stove that had poor fine flame control.) I did find that compressed fuel stoves like the classic butane Bleuet Gaz and the propane mini-models worked better for long slow baking. The liquid gas models like the Sveas (does anyone still used those?), Colemans and military surplus types were less compatible with even baking. A windscreen was necessary in all cases to maintain an even flame under the pot, at any rate.
In the end I decided that it was not worth the bother of baking in camp – maybe because I am female (and, at least in my generation, exerting the bulk of household food prep at home) I was less charmed by the idea of elaborate camp cooking than my mostly male hiking companions. There are so many durable flatbreads and simple and quick to prepare hearty dishes that don’t require complex extra gear and tending that I stopped fussing with those menu items. Also true that you get a bit jaded when in the outfitter biz too long and get tired of all the gizmos. Eventually I only brought foods that could be eaten right out of my pack or quickly heated in the single pot and frying pan that I carried (that my ancient Gaz stove nested with). Sometimes for trip of only a few days I would bring a bunch of PB & J sandwiches, a bag of apples, another of carrot slices and a few cans of sardines.
In the winter the only change in kit was the more powerful Phoebus and a larger pot to melt snow. One of the big advantages of winter camping (besides no bugs or poison ivy) is your pack is a fridge and you can bring whatever food you like.
While I understand that the Scouts have always tried to teach “roughing it” basic skills, the days of being like John Muir and spending weeks in the high country with a flint firestriker and a “bag of meal” are long past. My amateur botanist Dad taught me some foraging and I could, if I had to, find enough to survive if stranded most places (just build a fire and eat the fat and protein rich moths that flock to it for one thing) but why bother when every grocery and health food store is full of dried, precooked and/or packaged stuff you can eat with little prep? Being out in Nature is luxury enough for me: I don’t need gourmet meals.