Baking Bread Without an Oven

By Sara:

I recently did some experiments with friends to see how we could teach people a simple method to bake bread without an oven.  It was a fun time and we were successful in figuring out different options.  We started out by making yeast bread dough and letting it rise.  We put sand into a large pot and put it over a fire.  Then, we set our pan of rolls inside that pot, on top of the sand, and covered it.  We discovered that we needed to keep the fire pretty low to prevent the rolls from burning, but they did get ready and browned nicely like rolls in an oven.

We also made a loaf of bread using the same method.

After that, we also made "salty buns", my grandma's recipe, on a frying pan.  You put some oil or cooking fat on the pan with salt sprinkled on it, then let the rolls rise on top of it for 30 minutes.  After that, you fry the rolls on both sides.  This one was my personal favorite, but other people preferred sweet bread to salty.  Perhaps it would be more locally acceptable if the salt was left out.

 

By the end, we still had dough left over, so we fried some of it like traditional Ugandan mandazi (sort of like doughnuts).  Those turned out well too although they might not be cost-effective for someone to sell and make a profit. 

All in all, it was a productive day and now we have more skills we could share with other people who want to learn!