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

Adding a bit of salt to your recipe would greatly improve the flavor, and salt is also an important nutrient.

When I was a little girl, I'm an old lady now, my dad would make us bannock as a breakfast treat some times on the weekend. He would throw in some rasins and cinnamon. My brother and I just loved it. It tasted so good. He also loved the outdoors and we all would go camping every summer. He's gone now but good memories. Thank you for the reminder.

This reminds me of how I reinvented my own granola bars for camping and hiking - oatmeal, peanut butter, chopped nuts and dried fruit, a bit of honey and chia seeds added for binding, enough water to make it into a dough, then form bars and bake at ~215 F / 100 C for hours until they're dried out and won't go bad. They've been fine after 6+months.

The American frontiersmen, John Coulter (who in my humble opinion was America's greatest frontiersmen), made a 1200 mile trip by himself in the dead of winter through some of the harshest conditions to establish trade with the Spanish occupied territories in what is now the New Mexico/Arizona states.
At one point he was bogged down in 3ft snow and freezing temps for months. So he made a little shelter, shot some animals, and made pemmican. And for months just kept a fire going in his little stick/pine/moss tent, and ate pemmican.
When the winter broke he continued on his merry way.
Men were built different back then lol
He was also the first white man to set eyes on what is now Yellowstone National Park. The terrain he described led no one to believe him. Since what he was talking about didn't exist anywhere else on Earth.
One area he described everyone jokingly referred to as "Coulter's Hell" because it was so insane, hot, smelly, and weird that they thought he was describing hell.
And that's what it's called today. If you google it, one part of Yellowstone will come up with that label. :)

Fandabi Bannocks Recipe
1 part fat 8 (by weight), suet, coconut oil (possibly cocoa butter?)
1 part oatmeal
2 parts flour
Combine ingredients into a large bowl.
Add a few tablespoons of hot water and mix well. Continue to add water as needed. Mix very thoroughly after each water addition. If you are impatient with this, you may add too much water.
Knead the dough into a ball while in the bowl. The constancy looks like chocolate chip cookie dough. It should not stick to your hands.
Prepare a baking sheet with parchment (baking) paper.
Remove dough form bowl. Add some oats to the bowl.
Tear off chunks of dough the size of an average man's fist. Shape into a patty the thickness of your
fingers. Sprinkle one side with oats, rub and pat the oats in, flip and repeat.
Place Bannocks into a 200C (395F) preheated oven and bake for 10 minutes.
If wanted them to last longer than a week, turn oven temperature down to 50C (122F - most US ovens only go down to 175F unless really old) and bake for another hour.
Place on wire rack to cool down completely.

Hope you don't mind. I use CopyMeThat to bookmark recipes. This way people don't have to add the details.

As a long time hard tack baker, I like to get a circular cookie cutter to standardize the shapes. It makes storage and packing a lot easier when theyre all the same size.

A friend was an extra in a U.S. Civil War movie. He says had to stand on a slope of a hill for one scene, but it was a little muddy and he kept slowly slipping out of position, so he took out some hard tack and broke it up to give himself some traction...

I made a batch of these bikkies up yesterday, and they turned out surprisingly well - very pleasant to eat!
I used some diced dates, diced beef jerky, and a dash of nutmeg and cinnamon, and they were quite nice - a pleasant mix of sweet and salty. :)

My grandma made patties to eat during a long car trip. I don't remember the name of it, but it contained flour, salt, grease drippings, and sour kraut. They were about six inches wide and a half-inch thick. They were an acquired taste, but boy, they stuck with you during the day. Grandma's family were farmers from Bohemia, and I imagine the men walking out to the fields with one or two of these patties in their pockets to munch on during a long day working in the fields.

What about second breakfast? What about elevenses? Luncheon? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper? He knows about them, doesn't he?

Very informative! For a backpacking trip of 1 to 2 weeks I usually have brought beef jerky, pemmican with cranberries (I'm from the north east of America), dried and powdered eggs, and what I've been calling a "quick bread" or "camp bread" mix to cook each morning - 1 cup flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Mix it with 1/3 cup water (3 to 1 ratio) and knead into a stiff dough while your powdered eggs are soaking and bake it in a covered pan. Any leftover from breakfast can be carried in your pocket for lunch. I think now I'll make a few Fandabi bannocks at home beforehand and skip breakfast and eat them while trout fishing for lunch and supper. Thanx for whetting my appetite!

I had great success replicating this, thank you! I used coconut oil, added roasted garlic, herbs, and nutritional yeast for a completely plant based cheddar bay biscuit knockoff 😂. Excellent taste on the trail though.

So I made one of these as a trial, used:
40g tallow
40g rolled oats
80g plain flour
Tbs raisins
Tbs brown sugar
Pinch of salt
Rosemary

Worked out to about 900 calories and tasted excellent. Will absolutely make a batch for my next hunting trip.

I just made these right after watching the video. They are actually really good. I followed your instructions exactly (added brown sugar and raisins) except I baked them longer (200c/392f) at 20 minutes because they didn’t brown at 10 minutes. I then left them in oven at 62c/145f for another hour. They turned out great. The raisins definitely make them more palatable. I like these much better than eating plain pemmican or corn dodgers. Thanks for thinking this up!

In 1975 we hiked the Tahoe-Yosemite Trail.
180 miles.
We carried Bannock
(And a #10 Can of Mountain House Freeze Drived Beef Stew.)

Loved your video! Just found you today. I am thrilled to have this recipe. It would also be a blessing on a road trip with my 6 grandchilder! Adding this to my repertoire now. As a descendant of the Scots-Irish (Ulster Scots) who settled in the mountains of Virgina and Tennessee, I feel a real connection to your part of the world and I love your presentations. Funny...I can watch videos of other parts of the world and I feel curious and interested but when I see even pictures of the countryside of Scotland and Ireland my heart skips a beat and my soul feels oddly wistful. Sounds crazy, huh? :) Blessings!

You can also double bake it to remove more moisture and lengthens the shelf life

Calorie estimate: 2 cups flour 900 cal/1 cup oats 300 cal/1 cup fat 1600 cal so 2800 calories for 4 bannocks not counting any additional added ingredients. 700 calories each so daily ration of 3 bannocks would be 2100 calories, which is pretty good.

I made some of these last night. I tweaked the recipe slightly to my own tastes. Instead of all plain flour I used a quarter cup of barley flour and 1 ¾ cups plain flour. Instead of raisins I used sultanas and spiced I used plenty of nutmeg (Townsends would approve), some ginger and ground cinnamon.
I think I need to adjust the baking time to my oven but the results are still really rather nice. So I'm taking them with me tomorrow when some friends and I go walking in the Peak District.

Tip for making the insides of these harder, so they won't crush so easily and extending their shelf life is to take a skewer, poke holes through them, and then bake them for longer. Or to first bake them, them take them out to rest, then bake them again, and repeat as many times as you see fit. The more times you bake them, the harder they will get, the more force they can withstand, and the more you'll need to introduce liquid to actually make them edible... But they will likely last months as a result.