Survival Rations Inspired by History - Just 3 a day will keep you full of energy!

[Music] we need food to fuel us but the question is what is the bare minimum we need to feel satiated and energized while on the journey over the last 11 years I've been on various wheat survival trips and Expeditions all around the world sometimes taking no food and only relying on what I could catch and forage while other times experimenting with the bare minimum ingredients I've tried many modern camping meals but they're often very expensive not versatile and leave your pack full of single-use Packaging this has led me to wonder well the people of the past made and carried for their food rations in this video I'll share my basic principles for food from a survival perspective and discuss three historical rations from different cultures inspired by these I've come up with my own simple survival ration that I affectionately call The Fan dabby Bannock I found I only need to eat two or three of these a day to keep me full of energy while on an expedition they can be made very cheaply at home can be eaten cold or hot are customizable and can be carried easily with little or no packaging with just three main ingredients I'll show you how to easily make them at home so stay tuned foreign thanks for tuning in so if you're new to the channel I like to make videos about Wilderness survival skills and martial arts often from our historical perspective and what I love so much about these topics is how it forces you to simplify life right down to its absolute Basics and in this video I'm going to simplify the fourth and the last priority survival food now let's first be clear I'm not a nut nutritionist or a dietitian I'm a survivalist who's interested in Simplicity and multi-functionality and my intention with this video is to provide you with principles you can apply for creating a really simple high calorie food ration with flexibility depending on your dietary requirements now before I get into it I first off want to say a huge thanks to all the people who support me on my patreon page they're on the school of the Altan tier I've started releasing some extra online videos with the idea that this could evolve into online courses they are on the school of the Alton tier you'll find the follow-on video to this one where I'll show you how to make my fan Debbie Bannock on a campfire with some Forest ingredients using historical utensils so consider joining if you're interested now this video isn't sponsored by anyone and ideally in the future I want the channel to be less reliant on sponsors and becoming a patron is the best way for helping the channel do that you can also show some love by buying a t-shirt first off we'll what's the limitations to Modern Survival rations and camping meals over the years I've tried many different types and in terms of convenience sure the win absolutely hands down you just buy them in the shops stick them in your rucksack and you're good to go but I found they do also have some downsides the bar on the bag ones are great because you can eat hot or cold but then you're carrying a lot of weight and often they don't taste that good cold the dehydrated meals super lightweight but very expensive and not that useful if you're in a situation where you can't heat water they usually have lots of salt and preservatives and what they both have is a lot of packaging and I found after a long trip your rucksack can end up overflowing with all this litter and even if you're careful you might end up dropping some leaving a trace in the landscape not very stealthy so with this in mind I wanted to create a food rash and I could take on both my modern and historical Journeys with the following criteria one easy and cheap to make in large batches two be in a bar or biscuit form that could be eaten cold or added to hot water to make a stew three easy to pack and store my bag for meal plans something that will get crushed 4. have a long shelf life or be kept in a freezer till needed 5. high calorie and nutrition to weight ratio 6. no single use plastic packaging and seven tasty and a feel-good factor so in order to create to this ultimate food ration I thought I first need to simplify and rethink food from a survival perspective and then look at the past and see what people did for their food rations so here's my overly simplistic approach to food from a survival perspective I'm going to split what our body needs into two categories one the fuel what gives our mind and bodies energy and two the building blocks what are the raw materials that allows our cells to repair themselves and allows our body to do all the complex thing it does to Keep Us Alive under the category of fuel I'd put fats carbohydrates and sugars and out of the category of building blocks I put proteins micronutrients vitamins and minerals and fiber now humans have adapted to almost every climate on Earth but from my experience from doing survival trips in Scotland I found it's not too hard to get the building blocks from the wild especially if you're by the coast shellfish provide a reliable source of protein and seaweed can give you your macronutrients also fishing is a great way to get protein now you can get energy from protein alone through ketosis but this isn't very efficient so this is why we need the fuel in forms of fats carbohydrates and sugars but these are very hard to find in the wild I can think of two or three wild edibles you can find in Scotland that can give you carbohydrates and these are often very seasonal habitat specific and require a lot of Prior processing before you can actually eat it sure you can get sugars from some wild fruit but again this is very seasonal and for this reason this is why every civilization on Earth is built upon a reliable source of carbohydrate people could grow in the East it was rice and the Americas it was corn and potatoes and in the west it was wheat barley and oats so with this in mind I knew the foundation of my ration recipe had to be based on the fuel things are going to give me energy that's hard to find in the wild I then could in theory get my building blocks from the wild if I had to but I also sure you could create infinite varieties of this recipe to include the building blocks of protein and micronutrients if you want to so if fuel is the hardest thing to find in the wild let me ask you a question if you could only carry one ingredient with you what would have the highest calorie to weight ratio plus a very long shelf life what do you think to me it'd be some sort of fact and the king of all facts in my opinion is suet or Tallow which is basically rendered suet now Suite is the fact found around the kidneys of a cow it is packed full of calories and it has an incredibly long shelf life this is why it is one of the main ingredients in the Native American survival food known as pemmican now pemmican is a food originating from North America and it basically consists of a lean meat that has been dried and then ground into a flower this flower is then mixed with suet sometimes dried berries and spices are also added it has an incredibly long shelf life you know the years or even into the decades and the stories of people surviving off this stuff for months or even years at a time now the secret to pemmican's long shelf life is getting rid of the moisture through the drying process and then by allowing the suet to soak into the meat it stops the moisture from returning now I've made payment before and it's very tasty but the slicing and the drying of the meat can take a long time and I wanted my main ingredient of my survival ration to be a carbohydrate however this use of suet as a high calorie preservative really inspired me another historical ration that inspired me was hard tack or ships biscuits which has been used by armies and navies from all around the world and ages it's very simple it's just flour water and a bit of salt pushed into a flat disc and baked for hours and hours and end until it becomes Rock Solid it lasts a long time if it's kept dry if it brings on moisture then it can go off and there's famous stories of these biscuits getting Infested by weevils during long sailing Journeys it's a bit boring by itself as a ration and it does need some sort of fat to stop the moisture getting back in the final historical food that inspired me was ban breads originating from Scotland organic bread is basically an unleavened bread its main ingredients being oatmeal barley flour butter and water to me is the tastiest out of all three and I like that addition of oatmeal oatmeal just sits well on my stomach I like the way it releases energy and it also provides a bit of extra fiber and protein the butter although tasty doesn't have that long a shelf life though so it's got me thinking can I combine the best things from these historical rations can I use the suet from the pemmican the long baking process of the Heart Attack mixed with the rough ingredient ratios of the Bannock breads to create the ultimate simple food ration thus we found Abby Bannock was born so how do you actually make a fan dabby Bannock well it basically consists of three ingredients with a wee bit of hot water to help out the rough ratios I've been using is one part fat one part oatmeal and two parts flour of course the fat I'm using is the wonderful suet you can get it fresh from The Butchers but it's often easier to buy it in pellet form in a box like this now if you're vegan you could use coconut oil it's also packed full of calories and also has a long shelf life if you're gluten intolerant you don't have to use wheat flour you could use a gluten-free flour such as rice flour or even potato flour tastes pretty good with these three ingredients you can add whatever flavorings you want you can make it sweet by adding sugar and dried fruit you can make it Savory by adding beef jerky and herbs and spices just go mad with it but this is the three ingredients I've been using I'll show you how you can make a sweet banic in a modern kitchen and then I'll show you how you can make it out in the woods preheat your oven the 200 degrees Celsius grab a mixing bowl and add your one part oatmeal your two parts flower one two you can also add your flavorings now because I'm making a sweet manic I'm gonna add a couple tablespoons of brown sugar and a spattering of raisins and I'm just eyeballing all this and mix that up I'm also going to add some allspice just for giggles and your one part fat it's a saucepan and let it melt once your fat is melted into a liquid add it to your flour an oatmeal mix and give it a good stir before the fat hardens once your mixture so it looks like a crumble now you just slowly add small amounts of boiling water at a time until the mixture turns into a dough that you can knead with your hands try not to add too much water to start with because then you need to add more flour to counteract it so just add small amounts of water at a time and just keep keep mixing use my hands let's get in there knead it yeah like we would bread you want to get to this sort of consistency where you can knead it in your hands and it doesn't doesn't stick to your hands at this point get a baking tree Ready put some baking paper on it and what I like to do is add just a little bit of oatmeal I'm gonna tie the flower at the bottom of your bowl and you're just going to use this to coat your bannocks before you put them on the baking tray so when you got to this consistency it does like to break off chunks but the size of your fist let's smash them into biscuit sizes that are just wider than your hand and Pat them down you want them to be about a finger thick and that is wide as you have you can then just coat them with some oatmeal and flour and stop it from sticking to kind of rub that on the pattern on and there is one Bandit ready to go lit on the baking paper and do it again place them on your baking tray and these and they're ready to go in the oven now place your bannocks in a preheated oven around 200 degrees Celsius after baking for 10 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius you can see they've already gone golden brown at all you could take these out now let them cool if you uh we're gonna eat them within the next week or so but using this theory of the hard tech the counter that baking it long uh lower Heat well I might try doing is turn the temperature down to 50 degrees Celsius and just leave them in for about an hour or so just to make sure that all the moisture gets open so these have been baking at a low heat 50 degrees Celsius for an hour just to get them nice and dry I'm gonna take these out place them on a wire rack and let them cool down completely oh they smell good so there you go folks there are the finished fandabby bannocks now remember these are our food ration something that's easy to carry that's going to give you lots of energy while on a journey not something to have your entire diet as I'm also aware it's probably not something that's going to win any baking competitions now how would I describe that if I could describe them in one word I would say dense okay they're pretty hard but they're not brittle which is important so that they won't get crushed in your pack the outside of them it's kind of crispy but in the middle all that suet has collected to add some flexibility you could see and also if the taste is going to depend a lot and what um you know flavorings and other ingredients you've added to it but with sugar and raisins it's delicious it's kind of like lavender spread from Lord of the Rings you don't need to eat a lot of it and it's something about that suet and the oats just seem to swell in your stomach filling you up when I'm on the journey I just tend to break off little bits eat it it does help to wash it down with water to help the digestion now I didn't add any raising agents because raising agents would you know make it a bit more palatable and softer and fluffier but it would make it crumbly and it would fall apart in your back basically you want it hard enough so that if someone threw this at you it would hurt now my favorite way of carrying the bannocks without using plastic is using beeswax wraps you can either make these or buy these it's basically a square piece of cloth that's impregnated with beeswax I've added a button and one corner with a length length of string with this you can make food Parcels for every day of your journey now say if you made three different flavors of bannocks you could have one for your dinner one for your lunch and one for your breakfast and just stack them like this you can then fold the corners it'll be a wax rat over with the corner with the button last like this then you can use this string to wrap around all the way around your parcel holding it in place and there you go there is a 24 hour ration parcel you can then make multiple ones of these how many days you're going out and just stack them in your rucksack like this now of course if you sat on them yes they will get crushed but they can withstand the normal amount of battering bashing around in your rucksack and at the end of your journey rather than having mountains of packaging you just have a few bits of fabric that you can reuse on your next Journey now what about the shelf life of These Fine daddy bannocks well there'd be so many factors at play especially with different ingredients you would add to it that I can't give you an accurate answer but to me with the three basic ingredients if they were packaged well right after baking and stored in the cool dry dark place I don't see why they wouldn't last for several years at least there you go folks hope you enjoyed this video on my fan Debbie bannocks try them out let me know in the comments how you get it on if you want extra lessons check out my patreon page thanks so much for watching and I'll be back with another video as soon as I can happy cooking

Channel: Fandabi Dozi

Views: 903,618

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Id: V0cxV2vVC0U

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 29 2023