Hardtack - 24hourcampfire

Buy it?
Make it?

Have some, just in case?

when I get home, I'll post a recipe that is true to what the Brits made for ship use back in the sailing days.

Growing up in an substantially Italian once commercial fishing community we ate the hell out of hardtack. A round and a stack of mortadella was the deal. Use to buy it at any number of the local proper deli's. Just last week I was thinking of it and found these folks that sell it. When I am home for Christmas I plan to give it a try.

http://www.bentscookiefactory.com/hardtack.html

I was a CW re-enactor for 12 years. We had to make our own hard crackers (hard tack or pilot bread) for authenticity. Here are two recipes that will turn them out.

1 Original recipe:

2 cups flour 1/2 Tbs. sugar
1/2 Tbs. salt @ 3/4 cup water

Mix dry ingredients add water and knead to a stiff dough @ 1/4 inch thick. Trim to a square and punch holes with a fork into the dough. Bake about 1/2 hour at 350 flipping crackers @ every 5 minutes. If still soft after baking leave oven on warm and toast until cracker is dry and hard. Pack in flour.

You can eat these things if you have good teeth. They are better soaked in water and then fried in bacon grease or broken up and added to a stew. That is the way most ate them during the CW.

2 Improved Hard Tack

2 cups flour 1 Tbs brown sugar
1/2 Tbs salt 1/4 cup liquid oil
3/4 cup milk.

Mix dry ingredients add oil and milk and kneed and roll dough @ 1/4 inch thick. Cut in squares to the size you like @ 3X3 inch was simi standard. Punch holes in one side.
Bake at 400. Flip when edges start to brown. Done when stiff.

These you can eat w/o breaking teeth and are actually pretty good. Will last a week of two just carried in a haver sack wrapped in news paper. A couple of these with a chunk of boiled and toasted salt pork make a filling meal.

Variations: 1 cup white 1 cup whole wheat flour--- Use Peanut oil for a different flavor--- use Onion salt for regular salt.

ps use plain salt not iodized salt for all hard tack

Originally Posted by EdM

Growing up in an substantially Italian once commercial fishing community we ate the hell out of hardtack. A round and a stack of mortadella was the deal. Use to buy it at any number of the local proper deli's. Just last week I was thinking of it and found these folks that sell it. When I am home for Christmas I plan to give it a try.

http://www.bentscookiefactory.com/hardtack.html

The order link is not working.

Here's something to go with it.

Quote

Pemmican. A food preparation (also spelled pemican) used in the wilds of the northern parts of North America, and made by cutting the meat of the reindeer into thin slices, drying the latter in the sun or over the smoke of a slow fire, pounding them fine between stones, and incorporating the material with one-third part of melted fat. To this mixture, dried fruit, such as choke or June berries, is sometimes added. The whole is then compressed into skin bags, in which, if kept dry, it may be preserved for four or five years. Sweet pemmican is a superior kind of pemmican in which the fat used is obtained from marrow by boiling broken bones in water. Fish pemmican is a pemmican made by the Indians of the remote regions of the N. W. by pounding dried fish and mixing the product with sturgeon oil. The [Inuit] of Alaska make a pemmican by mixing chewed deer meat with deer suet and seal-oil. "This food," observes Lieut. Ray, "is not agreeable to the taste, probably owing to the fact that the masticators are inveterate tobacco-chewers." The word is from Cree pimikan, 'manufactured grease,' from pimikeu, 'he (or she) makes (or manufactures) grease,' that is, by boiling crude fat, pim�, in water and skimming off the supernatant oil. The verb is now used by the Cree in the sense of 'he makes pemmican.' The word is cognate with Abnaki pimik�n

My friend always brings "Pilot Bread/Crackers" backpacking. He thinks they're neat but I don't get the attraction.

[Linked Image]

I love good food, far more than most, but when backpacking, all I give a chit about is cramming calories in my hole.

Hard tack sucked azz a hundred years ago, it's gonna suck azz now.

Better calories are easily a available.

Too many "holes" in one paragraph......which one are you cramming calories in?.......guess I really don't want to know after all!

The one with teeth. The other is hard to chew with.......

I guess I don't see the attraction to eating flour that's rock hard.

Eating hardtack beats eating nothing.
I've tried both.

Oh, Yummy...!