Simple, Low-Cost Foods For Wilderness Travel

 
Leon Pantenburg over at Survival Common Sense has just posted a great article about using basic staple foods in a survival situation.  In this article he focuses on flour and the many ways to prepare it that were once in widespread practice by wilderness travelers and explorers, but are seldom used today.  In particular, he discusses bannock, fry bread and hard tack.  Check out the article here:  http://survivalcommonsense.com/2010/06/15/flour-recipesfeed/

I've experimented with these simple flour recipes myself on extended trips where quantities of staples became more important than variety.  Fry bread, or a variation of it made with cornmeal and water, called "hoe cakes," is very simple to make while on the move.  "Hoe cakes" get their name from an old share-cropper's method of cooking them on the flat blade of a hoe while taking a break from working crops.

Another method of making bread from flour if  you don't have a skillet (or a hoe) to fry it on, is simply to bake it right on the coals of a fire.  These are called "ash cakes" and while they may be burnt a bit on the outside and covered with ash, the bread inside is just as good as if you baked it in an oven, once you experiment a bit to get the time and heat levels right.  Tom Brown Jr. describes this method of making bread from natural flours such as acorn flour or cattail flour in his book: Tom Brown's Field Guide to Edible and Medicinal Plants. 

On all of my long-distance sea kayaking trips and many of my backpacking trips, I carried complete pancake mix as a staple rather than plain flour.  You would be surprised how many pancakes you can eat for breakfast when you're living out of a kayak and traveling 8 to 10 hours per day, often against wind or current.  The other morning staple which I prefer now is oatmeal, probably because I ate so many pancakes on those trips I made myself sick of them.  The good thing about oatmeal is that it can be eaten cooked or raw.  You may not realize it, but soaking a bowl of oatmeal in cold water (or milk if you have it) renders it quite palatable without turning it to mush like cooking does.  This makes it a great source of carbohydrates easily eaten on the go.  Of course it's always better if you can supplement it with some wild blackberries, blueberries or crushed nuts.

My main wilderness staple, however, has always been rice - either plain white or natural brown rice.  This is the ingredient at the center of every evening meal, and since it goes well with anything, the possibilities are endless, whether you have some form or wild edible plant or animal food, or something in your pack you brought with you.  For me, the favorite combination for hard travel is brown rice mixed with tuna.  I used to carry the standard sized cans of tuna, but now it is available in more convenient foil packages.  This combination of complex carbs and high-protein fish is real food you can travel on.  I've never had a desire to bother with that expensive, tasteless freeze-dried stuff.

Rice is quick to cook and compact and long-lasting when uncooked, and even keeps for awhile after it's cooked.  While trekking through the jungle in Honduras and Nicaragua with my friend Ernest, our Miskito Indian guides simply cooked rice one time per day in the evening when we made camp, then kept the leftovers in the cooking pot with the lid on, packing the whole thing in a backpack for the day's trek, eating it for breakfast and lunch as well.  For a simple way to cook rice over a fire, see my post on Cooking On a Green Sapling Tripod. (as shown in the photo above).  Note that this method also works great with skillets and that you can use it to make your fry bread, hoe cakes, or pancakes, as well as boil your morning coffee, if you have it.