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posted by on Sunday May 21 2017, @04:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-it-tastier-by-comparison dept.

When soldiers go into the field, they carry with them tiny miracles of engineering. And we're not just talking about weaponry: some very technical and forward-thinking research has gone into military meals. They must be light and easy to carry, capable of staying edible even after weeks in the hot sun, supply the surprisingly high number of calories that soldiers in the field need (more than 4,000 a day), and, of course, not cost the taxpayer an inordinate amount. That has led to some clever tricks of science that have even made their way into the goods you may find on your shopping list.

One of the most interesting items in army rations, from an innovation perspective, is the bread, says writer Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, author of the book Combat-Ready Kitchen. Freshly baked bread begins going stale the moment it comes out of the oven, as strands of a starch called amylose spread all throughout its structure and start to harden. Amylose can be snipped up by enzymes called amylases, but these are denatured by heat as the bread cooks – hence the generally unappealing, razor-to-the-gums qualities of a baguette after a few days.

In the mid-20th Century, however, food scientists at Kansas State College with connections to the US military discovered that adding amylases that stand up to heat changed the equation. These enzymes, which come from heat-tolerant bacteria, kept right on snipping after baking, keeping bread almost eerily soft and flexible and giving it a long shelf-life.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 21 2017, @08:19PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 21 2017, @08:19PM (#513140)

    Limeys called it hardtack - hard biscuit, really a thick cracker.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 21 2017, @08:29PM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 21 2017, @08:29PM (#513145) Journal

    Found a recipe, years ago, and the sons and I made hardtack at home. A couple of attempts were just -mehhh- but we got it right on the third try. Yeah, it's very much like a Saltine cracker, and you can vary the amount of salt you put on them to your taste. Pretty good stuff, actually. Unlike Saltine crackers, they don't go stale unless they get wet. There were batches of the stuff that sat on the pantry shelf for weeks, before being eaten up. No sealed containers, they didn't need them.

    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday May 22 2017, @06:01AM (1 child)

      by Reziac (2489) on Monday May 22 2017, @06:01AM (#513342) Homepage

      Back in the 1970s we discovered a cache of my dad's C-rations from when he was in the Army (1950ish). Opened 'em up and ... dang, the cracker is actually still good. So is the cake of hard cocoa. Don't remember what else was in 'em, but yeah, some things keep forever.

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 22 2017, @08:54AM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 22 2017, @08:54AM (#513397) Journal

        The Navy still possessed some of those, when I joined. Up until about 1978, you could find some, here and there. They weren't "for issue", but people had caches of them, here and there, that they just never gave up. Of course, by that time, "C-rations" aboard ship had been completely redefined. The galley remained open during General Quarters, where they prepared sandwiches and finger foods that could be distributed to the combat stations. Still - if you only got two or three dinkey little finger sandwiches, and you were still hungry, you could dig into a stash of 30 or 40 year old food.