Now, I have to say…I am a little reluctant to actually call this hardtack. Because everyone who knows anything about hardtack knows it is a small, tasteless, hard cracker that can last for years. But when I ran across this recipe in my Oregon Trail cookbook, I was like, well, maybe I was mistaken. Or maybe it is a different kind that somehow uses yeast and still survives long distances. And, honestly? I have no idea. Maybe it’s an old recipe from someone who couldn’t handle the tasteless stuff. Maybe the cookbook curators took it a step too far in trying to make it palatable. No matter the reason for this more ingredient heavy version, the experience was interesting.
Hardtack
The Oregon Trail Cookbook
I started by boiling and mashing a potato. Easy enough. While it cooled, traditional bread-making methods kicked in by dissolving yeast in warm water. Once the potato cooled, the recipe instructed me to make a sponge of yeast and potato and graham flour (which we’ll talk about in a minute). Now. This gave me heartache. I mixed the potato and yeast together and it was…really, really thick, as you might imagine. Nothing like what I thought a sponge should be. But I did my utmost, and I got that stuff mixed! And it was at that point that I realized the very succinct recipe also had potato water in the ingredients list and that there was no place else to add the potato water, so it clearly intended me to add that to the “sponge” as well. Do you know how hard it is to mix two cups of water into a thick mixture? Not as hard as it had been adding the graham flour to the otherwise still-thick mixture, but it is, okay? I was just glad I hadn’t thrown out the potato water yet. Procrastination for the win!
Okay, now, what is this graham flour I mentioned? Well, I wondered the same thing. I thought at first that it was just crushed graham crackers or something. But no. Apparently it is a special type of flour (one that is, in fact, used for graham crackers), and…relatively hard to get. It’s essentially a coarsely ground wheat flour invented by Sylvester Graham (I will say, there is at least one Oregon Trail letter touting the benefits of graham crackers, so whatever the recipe’s questionable ingredients, this isn’t necessarily one of them). The Spruce Eats describes it as “more coarsely ground than standard whole wheat flour, producing a rustic texture and nutty, lightly sweet flavor.” I could not figure out where to buy this flour. I found only one site that sold it and it would have been over $20 including shipping, which I was not willing to spend for a bit of flour. So, I did what everyone else online was doing. I made it myself. Or as close as I could come. I used a recipe from Food.com mixing together white flour, wheat bran, and wheat germ, all of which I could buy from a regular store!
Okay, back to the sponge. Per the recipe, I let it rise until foamy and bubbly. I probably would have let it rise more, but apparently I put it in too small a container because it started foaming over the lip of the bowl. So it was time to move forward. From there, I added syrup, salt, fat, more graham flour, and some white flour to make one nice, thick dough. The recipe said bacon fat or other shortening, so we took the excuse to make two pounds of bacon with breakfast in the morning! But that apparently was only half the amount of fat I needed, so I supplemented it with lard. The dough looked so beautiful that I was definitely questioning the recipe now (Oregon trail, really?) if I’d been making excuses before…and then I tasted it.
I felt rather sorry that Daniel would have to eat this, but not enough to stop making it. I let the dough rise, and then rolled it out “very thin”. Well, not as thin as I’m sure I was supposed to, but people, that was a LOT of dough. As it was, I had a ton leftover that I didn’t bother to bake. I put it in my largest cookie sheet and it didn’t fit. I probably should have just cut the recipe in half, or at least the dough and tried to get it even thinner, but in the moment it felt like maybe I was over-thinking very thin (now I doubt it).
From there, we let it rise again, pricked it with a fork and baked it “until crisp” – it is moments like these that I thought maybe it was an original recipe after all. What temperature? What does until crisp mean? How crisp. SO MANY QUESTIONS! So I just put it at like 400 and baked it until it looked done. Now I’m thinking I should have baked it until it looked burnt. Because when I cut it, it was definitely more like bread than some sort of cracker.
And then… I brought it to Daniel. Okay. Despite his face, it wasn’t nearly as bad as either of us were expecting. Which is another reason I admit I still question the recipe. but then again…beyond the bite we each took….we wouldn’t eat any more and all of it (including the leftover dough) ended up in the trash. So maybe it was as bad as we expected….either way, if what they had to eat was remotely close to this, they have all my sympathy. Oh, and don’t forget to head to Instagram to check out the 40-second version of this!
Forest Idylls 