When you are on the trail, food is important. You want to have energy for the hiking, but you don’t want the food to be too heavy (you have to carry it after all!) or elaborate to prepare. I’m a slow starter in the morning anyway, so one of my favorite trail breakfasts is Logan bread with coffee and a bacon bar. It can be eaten cold and munched while packing up the camp.
Logan bread is named after Mount Logan in the Yukon. The bread was taken on expeditions to explore the area. It is a dense, calorie rich food, and it keeps well. Logan bread also doesn’t become a crumbled mess in your backpack after several days on the trail. It is also very adaptable – you can change up the flavor in all sorts of ways. There are recipes that use rye flour and ones that use oats. Here is our version.
Logan Bread – basic fruit and nut recipe
- 3 5/8 cups whole wheat flour
- 3/8 cup brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons dry milk
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
- 1/4 to 1/3 cup chopped nuts
- 1/2 cup chopped dried fruit
- 1 cup water
- 5 tablespoons melted shortening
- 5 tablespoons honey
- 3/8 cup molasses
Put all of your dry ingredients in a big bowl. I add the chopped fruit and stir it up so that the pieces of fruit are separated and spread throughout the dough.
From left to right – the dry ingredients, the chopped fruit (apricots), and the fruit mixed into the dry ingredients.
I then add the water and the melted shortening. If you put the melted shortening in the measuring cup before measuring the molasses and honey, those ingredients don’t stick to the cup. Add it all together and mix, mix, mix. This is a very thick dough, and a stand mixer is helpful if you have one.
The thick dough is put on a piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet, then spread out to about an inch thick.
Bake the bread for an hour at 300 degrees. Turn the oven down to 200 degrees, and bake for another 2 hours or so, with the door propped slightly open. The goal is to have a moderately dry bread.
Let it rest for about 10 minutes on the cookie sheet, then use a large knife to cut it into 16 pieces. If you wait too long, it is hard to cut up.
Once it is thoroughly cool, I bag two pieces in a small bag. They are then all put in a larger container and put in the freezer.
A stable trail food
Logan bread stays good on the trail for some time. Out of curiosity, we left some out for a while and it was still good a month later. We usually make three or four batches in the spring to start the season, and then make more as needed later. We store it in the freezer for long term keeping and pull out what we need for a trip.
Logan bread made with this recipe has about 400 – 425 calories for a two piece serving. That makes it about 100 calories an ounce, which is a nice balance of weight and calories. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem dry when you eat it.
Flavor options
We have tried a wide variety of flavor combinations with mixed results. We tried cocoa and peanut butter powder with chopped peanuts once, and while it was okay, the peanut flavor was not at strong as we wanted.
Some to the options we really like include:
- Apricots and walnuts
- Blueberries and pecans
- Raisins and walnuts (with a little extra cinnamon)
- Cocoa powder and walnuts – skip the cinnamon and nutmeg
We recently found dried mandarin oranges and we’d like to try that with the cocoa powder.
I’ve talked some about other camping cooking in this post. I plan to talk more about it in the future, covering things like a trip’s worth of food for two and some more recipes adapted to the trail, like this zuppa recipe. You can find the posts on camp cooking by searching the tag camp cooking.
This recipe is adapted from the book “The Well-Fed Backpacker” by June Fleming. Her recipe makes 4 times the amount as ours does. You can find copies of her book here.
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