HARDTACKS - bread with a shelf life of a century
This 'bread' was already eaten by the ancient Egyptians. In more recent history on sailing ships that went on long trips. Columbus ate it when he discovered America. The settlers ate it when sailing from Europe to America. When they traveled long distance over
land they packed a lot of meal to bake bread. When it started to go bad they used all that was left to bake hardtacks which have a proven shelf life of over a century.
Because this bread is 1000's of years old, and eaten in many cultures it shouldn't come as a surprise it has many names. I think the WW2 Germans had the best name for it "Panzerplatten" which means "armor plates". You will understand why when you bake this extremely hard bread yourself.
There's a story that during the war the bread was brought to army camps and dumped on large piles. So much was baked that huge piles were left after the war. It was stored and eaten in another war 50 years later.
The bread is usually soaked for 10-15 minutes before eating. Or it was crumbled and cooked in a
skillet with lard or something else. The bread itself has little flavor but absorbs the flavor of the dish it's used in.
You can substitute meal with flour, add cornmeal, yeast and oil, but then you drift away from the original. Especially adding fat will shorten shelf life. Still good
enough for a hiking trip, but not when you stockpile it as emergency food.
Most likely the original recipe uses wheat because making flour was a technology of a more recent date.
Flour was said to be for the rich and meal for the poor. Nowadays it looks more like the opposite.
Wheat is simple ground seeds including the husk. Flour is super processed give a blood sugar spike and is void of nutrients just after processing. 75% of the nutrients you read on the package are added later on.
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The recipe:
Thoroughly mix 1kg of flour and 2 soup
spoons (30 gram) of salt.
Add 2.5 cups of
water, mix and knead.
This will be very tough dough that won't stick to anything. If you add more water you have to bake it out later.
Then make it about 0.5" thick with a roller pin. The shape doesn't really matter but rectangular-like is best.
With a fork punch many holes all the way through the dough. This stops the bread from puffing up during baking and helps drying the bread.
The cut it in 2"x2" piece. Put in a preheated oven at 180c/356F without touching each other.
Bake for 30 mins.
Flip.
Bake for another 30 mins.
The bread
should golden brown when you flip it. That's more important than exact times. Because of that my baking times are closer to 40+20 instead of 30+30 minutes.
But in no way start assuming this bread is hard to get right. It isn't. I'm sure there are a dozen perfect ways to bake it. I'm just sharing what I noticed.
I've seen someone baking this bread 2x60 min at 80C/176F. That's double the time, half the heat. On top of that she baked 0.25:" instead of 0.5" thick. I think that can be used as proof this bread doesn't require extreme skills to bake.
In fact like the huge heat range, because I plan to bake in a skillet too.
The result should be a as dry as possible bread. That's all.
If you plan to store the bread in a closed container let it dry out at least a week in open air.
This is one of the few recipes you can weigh on the scale after baking and know it's baked properly. The weight of the bread should be as close to the weight of the dry ingredients because everything above that is water.
I'll keep experimenting because the bread is a little to salty for my taste.
That's all. Sharpen your teeth and enjoy eating "armor plates"! :-)
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