Journal of the Yurt 3 Making Hard Tack

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well I split a bunch of wood today so I'd have plenty I don't run the stove in here too much during the day because it stays pretty warm in here during the day like I said you know I don't mind temperatures around 4045 degrees inside this place that's fine with me that's you know summer weather to me but see if I'm dressed right so talk to me fire the stove back up what I wanted to do tonight was before I turn in for the night or it gets too dark out which is going to get dark real soon I wanted to make some heart attack heart attack was a food staple during the Civil War and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we make this heart attack but the first thing I'm going to do is get this stove fired back up good thing about grease all it is you know it ignites pretty fast that's a real good fire starter in a camp situation or any situation like this what I'll generally do is I'll just take a piece of this fatty wood and I'll cut a little bit of a feather stick into it with my knife you don't have to get too excited with that especially if you're using a lighter but I'll just cut down into it a little bit of my Pathfinder knife just to expose a few edges here like this it just gives it a good place to catch fire real easy and it doesn't take much at all with this grease wood you can see the light it on fire once you expose that oil

and I'll usually put a couple pieces in there is to get a good hot fire going then I put some thinner smaller stuff in there to the side of that let's start burning it get that stoking up real good and then I can put some bigger logs in there as well basically just build a teepee in here just like I would in the fire pit I'm just leading those logs up against there I think you can see that from where we're at just leaning everything up against that one larger log in teepee fashion we build up around it when it all catches fire good starts to fall down it's on fire now I'll add some bigger stuff in there okay guys so let's talk about this heart attack for a minute excuse the glasses but I've got some things that I'm kind of reading to some notes down here like I said heart attack was something that was a staple food during the Civil War period and to go along with this 21st century long thunder series we talked about staple foods like pemmican we talked about and we talked about different kinds of drop biscuits and ash cakes things like that and a young lady requested that I do a video on heart attack so I thought I would go ahead and do that I've never made it before so I thought I'd go ahead and try it today Lieutenant Colonel CL Coburn wrote in a note or a letter that was dated 1863 called notes of preparing stores for the US Army and he gave a very detailed listing of what hardtack was supposed to be and how it was supposed to be stored in pack and how long it should last and how it should be made so I looked at the recipe that was on that website and what it says it's 4 cups of flour and that should be the finest grain wheat flour that you can find four tablespoons of salt two cups of water and that makes 10 3x3 half-inch thick pieces of heart attack and heart attack you'll see as we do this is very similar to a cracker type device but it's a little heavier and thicker than a cracker but it's very similar to a cracker done now one thing that you have to do with heart attack is you have to kind of bake it okay so I had to figure out a way to make an oven within this year and the way I'm going to do that because I've got two baking pans right here that I bought from a dollar store today they're pretty good size they're probably I don't know ten by twelve something like that ten by fourteen I'm going to put them on top of each other just like this to create a kind of an oven and I'm going to put that on top of the wood stove okay we have to do is we have to kind of make this hard tack first so let's get to that and then we'll get to the stove itself okay one of the things that I've found to be really useful you know around camp or on a trail anything like that or even you know in this year when you are making food is you need something to mix things in and sometimes it's good if you just use these ziplock freezer bags use one quart freezer bags you can always wash them out and reuse them but they're real good for mixing different types of dough's and things in because you can close it up seal it mix it up and then get the dough right out of the bag instead of dirtying a bunch of pots and pans to mess with it so what I'm going to try to do with this recipe is I'm going to try to cut it in fourths okay because I don't need this much heart attack so instead of using four cups of flour I'm going to use one cup and what I've got here is I've got some premium 100% whole wheat flour right here Dave Mitchell would be proud looks like it's pretty organic to me but what I'm going to do is I'm going to get one cup of this flour so measuring devices aren't easy to come by you know rushing would carry a whole bunch of measure and crap around with you but you have a pretty much eight ounce cup right here for one of my bottles to actually fits this bottle right here okay so with that that gives me that pretty much eight ounces so that would be one cup so if I dip that down in here and fill it up and just kind of level it off that's going to give me my one cup of wheat flour and that's what I'm going to put in this bag okay so we'll start with that and we'll get our flour bag close back up and stowed back in our tub where we've got it underneath the bed here now the next thing is calling for in this recipe is calling for four tablespoons of salt or four teaspoons of salt excuse me and again I don't have a teaspoon but I do have you know my titanium spork and it's about a teaspoon so I'm going to use 1 teaspoon of salt you know salt was something that was used and traded quite extensively along the frontier because they use it for so many things I'm in this case I've just got a one pound container Morton's salt here and I'm just going to fill up this titanium spork with that and guesstimate that to be one teaspoon some of the stuff is going to be a little bit hit-and-miss guys because you got to kind of do it as you go

one thing I remembered from the recipe when I read the Colonel's letter it stated that you should mix the salt with the water not with the flour I almost screwed that up guys so let me set this salt down for a second in a spoon and we're going to have to have two cups of water we want to cut that in fourths so we're going to need a half a cup of water basically so let me get my container over here that's probably partially frozen but that's okay and let's get a half a cup of water pour it into our cup can't forget to stoke our stove here while we're at this and we're not going to have an oven here in a minute let's take a look and see where outside looks like me a couple more pieces of wood in there real quick can't leave that open from it to get some air in there alright so now I'm going to take my salt and I'm going to mix it directly into my water first I suggested by the good turtle get that good mix together and then I'm going to go ahead and put the solution into my mixing bag just like this I hope if I've got my measurements pretty close to right I should be able to seal this bag up mush this all together and I should have they do or a batter when I'm done now the way I read this in the letter this stuff wasn't supposed to really be any more different consistency than any other kind of biscuit or batter that you're going to make it's supposed to be fairly thick not runny well mixed but you should be able to roll it out with a rolling pin now I don't have a rolling pin so what am I going to do well I'm going to use the back one of these cake pans as a flat surface that we're going to use for our oven and I'm going to use a round water bottle for a rolling pin I'm going to improvise with the equipment that I have you know I could make a wooden rolling pin easy enough I can go carve one out of tree but I've got about a water bottle sitting here why not use it I want to mix this up real good see how we're doing here I'm gonna let just a little bit of air out of this thing so I can kind of knead this dough a little bit more in my hand but so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna squeeze a little bit the air out of it and then seal it back up and that will allow me some room to maneuver to knead this together a little better like this yeah that's good untick good now according to this journal or this letter this hard tack is supposed to be about a half an inch thick so when I roll this out I'm just going to put a ball of it on this cake pan on the back side and I'm going to roll it basically into about a half inch thick square and we'll go from there okay okay so I've got my dough I'll knead it together here let's kind of get out of this bag and hopefully you know it won't stick this bag too bad coming out because that's you know we don't want it to be sticky we want it to kind of be you know the consistency of a flour and I'd say there might be just a little bit too much water in that if I had to guess but I could be wrong we'll find out I'm gonna go ahead and get myself a rinse pail for my hands here put some water in this bucket again buckets are multi-purpose you know I'm going to use it now to rinse my hands off and as I'm doing this so I'm going to take my water bottle here I'm actually going to put a little bit of this flour on the top of this thing just like your grandma used to do when she was making cakes I'm also going to put some of it on my would be rolling pin here let's start to roll this out now remember I don't want to get this thing any thinner than about a half an inch that's probably about a half an inch right there now typically I think these things were made in squares to tell you the truth but I don't think around is going to make any difference we're going to cut it either way so it's not really going to matter a little bit more flour on my hands here put this over in the flour a couple of times just the edges neat I think we've got it about a half an inch thick right now now the other thing that I read in that letter on prepping hardtack was that you were supposed to punch holes in it and it specifically said with a nail or some other device so that it has the consistency of like a saltine cracker but you're not supposed to punch that hole all the way through so I'm just going to take and put a row of holes in here I'm not quite going to punch them all the way through just to where I can kind of feel the edge of the pan maybe with this nail that probably helps it cook through I would guess okay I'm going to say that's pretty good to go okay now we've got our other pan here and basically what we're going to do is we're going to take our dough slide it off into this pan just like this wipe this dough off into our wash then make it a little bit of a mess that's okay

wipe anything off this on the back of sticky real quick just to get that cleaned up fairly well then I'm going to put this right over the top of this one and I'm putting this right on top of the wood stove just like this now what it said was that you should cook this for 15 minutes and then you should flip it so it cooks total for 30 minutes and I've got about a quarter after 5 right now so 5:30 we'll check it out and see what she looks like okay guys it's been about 15 minutes now I really don't remember my research whether it was 15 minutes per side 30 minutes total or 30 minutes per side for 60 minutes total I also don't know what the temperature this oven is so this is kind of a guestimation game but I'll let you know in the end it's been 15 minutes I can feel heat radiating out of this thing pretty good it feels pretty good and hard on the bottom and what a sudden was that you want this thing to be brown on both sides so I want to be careful not to break it when I'm flipping it here I can looks like it's pretty brown on that side and quite flip it to the middle that's okay but underneath the flower it looks like it's brown on this side there was a couple edges that were a little bit doughy but I think that 15 minutes is right we'll put about 15 minutes on this side we'll come back and check on it okay guys well it's been 15 minutes now on this other side pull this top off see what we got won't even burn the other side should be okay

oh nice pretty good okay well we got a cooling rack setting over here it's basically the rack that I took out of that oven I didn't use in here pretty convinced about that they come and put on the cooling rack and see what we got nothing else we know to cook it longer the next time right but it feels pretty good alright let's take it over here so I can move this camera over so you can see this cooling rack yeah gotta loosen something up here I don't know what I want to loosen think you can see that cool interacting I have to turn the light up just a little bit for you okay here we go set this down on the cooling rack and let her cool down see what we got see if we got some good hardtack here

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