Long shelf-life cookbook

There are many, many, cookbooks with titles like Easy...., Simple...., Budget...., 5-ingredients or less, etc

What I'm looking for is like an emergency cookbook.
For me that means cooking with long shelf-life ingredients.

A good example of my problem is flatbread. I Googled for simple recipes, and while simple with very few ingredients, they often contain yoghurt which isn't a long shelf-life food.
For me the cookbook I'm looking for may even contain weeds like nettle because I can easily pick them in the right season.

I'm aware it's likely a bit odd question but well....

I would recommend this cookbook since this Edition is from 1918, when many ingredients were basic.

https://permies.com/t/60914/Fannie-Farmer-Boston-Cooking-School

It may not have a recipe for flatbread though the recipes will not call for yoghurt as an ingredient in any recipe as far as I know of.

While I don't know since I have not tried substituting wild ingredients seems to me they would easily be substituted or added to the ingredients.

This classic American cooking reference includes 1,849 recipes, including everything from “after-dinner coffee”—which Farmer notes is beneficial for a stomach “overtaxed by a hearty meal”—to “Zigaras à la Russe,” an elegant puff-pastry dish. Bartleby.com chose the 1918 edition because it was the last edition of the cookbook authored completely by Farmer.

I don't have any off the top of my head, but the keywords you might want to use are "food storage cookbook". LDS (Mormon) communities that maintain large pantries of shelf-stable food have to cycle through them and lots of these cookbooks seem to be oriented toward (or written by) these folks.
There are also some good ideas and links here.
https://www.prepperssurvive.com/food-storage-cookbooks-pdf/

Instead of starting a whole new thread for something as simple as this I put it here.
I did some tests with soaking all sort of things for 24 hours.
Soaked Mie tasted very much like bread dough.
So I kneaded it a bit and put it in the oven without adding any ingredient.
The result is what's (like) bread. Don't expect fluffy tasty bread.
This bread is a bit watery in taste and not fluffy.
But with some sugar, it tastes quite good. In fact far better than I would have guessed.
Mie can be bought very cheap and (I think) it has a shelf-life of decades.



Mie is the flat ribbon like noodle in this picture.
https://cooksnapwin.com.au/mie-goreng-jawa-javanese-fried-noodles/

What is Mie? Since it has a long shelf life it sounds like a flour.

When I googled Mie Flour, this came up so it would be "All-purpose flour":

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/a-smaller-pain-de-mie-recipe

If I take plain white flour and do your experiment would I get the same results?

Thnaks for sharing as I can't wait to try this.

Anne Miller wrote:What is Mie? Since it has a long shelf life it sounds like a flour.

There are zillions of products for sale but when you look at the ingredients they are often very much the same.
Pasta, bread, cookies, etc all have wheat in them.
So I'm not surprised you found all-purpose flour.
All-purpose flour may turn out cheaper, but to turn it into bread you might need a few more ingredients.
The Mie-bread (if you can call it bread) is a one ingredient bread.
I'm going to experiment with it by adding long shelf-life ingredients like baking soda and salt.
My aim is to have several variations that I can bake depending on what I have in stock.
Might even add oil/fat.

Mie is a noodle. Comes as flat, round spaghetti like, with or without eggs.
Let's call it Chinese spaghetti..... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mie&atb=v276-1&iax=images&ia=images
I picked to most cheap and simple as I could find.

If I take plain white flour and do your experiment would I get the same results?

I've no idea but I think the answer is no because the Mie noodle is a finished product. It has processed ingredients in it.
I'm planning to keep experimenting with the Mie and that includes replacing ingredients.

Anyway the key to this game is finding ways to cook something with almost nothing. And, very important, recipes that allow you to be super flexible.
Keep in mind this is emergency cooking and most things taste great when really hungry

BTW the result isn't even remotely as that picture of a perfect bread you posted....

Look for "Jackie Clay's Pantry Cookbook". She's an awesome person, and has been homesteading longer than most of us have been alive.

There are three basic sources I go to when looking for pantry meal setups; Backpacking cookbooks, Preservation books, and Long-term storage cookbooks. Backpacking cookbooks have been offering up all sorts of ideas for decades on how to make filling and delicious meals from shelf-stable items. Preservation books are often full of recipes here and there throughout them. Some in the form of a meal in a can type situation and others in showing how to use your preserved foods. The last one is pretty obvious though. I went through my collection of cookbooks and here are some specific ones that might be helpful.

Backpacking
Trailside's Trail Food edited by John Viehman (assuming you can still find a copy anywhere)
Lipsmackin' Backpackin' by Christine and Tim Conners
Freezer Bag Cooking by Sara Svien Kirkconnell
Recipes for Adventure by Chef Glen McAllister
Cooking the One-Burner Way by Buck Tilton

Preservation
Complete Dehydrator Cookbook by Mary Bell
Putting Food By by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg, and Beatrice Vaughan
Stocking Up (no single author)

Long-term Storage
Cookin' With Home Storage by Peggy Layton
The Prepared Family Cookbook by Enola Gay
Cooking with Food Storage Made Easy by Debbie G. Harman

Out of the Lipsmackin' Backpackin' one, I could eat Cherry Walnut Couscous Porridge just about every morning. Soak it overnight for super plump cherries and no need to heat it in the morning! Some of the books have simple solutions like buttermilk powder for biscuits or using rehydrated cabbage in place of lettuce to make shelf-stable tacos. There's some good stuff buried in there.

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"! :-)