Category Archives: Fandabi Bannocks

Fandabi Bannocks – 2 Months

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For those that haven’t read the earlier post, I tried making Tom Langhorne’s guess at the ideal 16th century Highland survival ration, the idea being to test his reasonable claim that they would stay good to eat, unrefrigerated, for months or years.

And a little over two month in, we’re doing some microbiology stuff at work and I have a spare agar plate for growing a broad range of microorganisms, so I’ve taken a swab from both the outside and the inside of one of the bannocks, which have been sitting on a shelf at room temperature, wrapped in baking paper and tied with string.

The top half is from the outside of the bannock, the bottom half is from the inside, where I broke a chunk off about the side of a standard 2×4 Lego brick. This has had a week to grow at room temperature. When we take general environmental swabs (light switches, phones, doorhandles and so on) we normally get very obvious results in a few days, but I left this one going longer as there wasn’t much.

The big fuzzy splotch near the bottom is probably some kind of mould, likely the kind of thing you find on bread or cheese that’s starting to go off. The neat little round circles are probably streptococcus or staphylococcus, bacteria commonly found on human skin or in the mouth and throat. They may be there because I contaminated the plate while swabbing it, I didn’t do it in proper lab conditions….or they may have been on the bannock as a result of me handling them two months ago.

But long story short, this is a far lower level of microorganisms than I’d expect to see from a similar experiment with, say, a computer keyboard. And people touch those the whole time, then eat a sandwich with their hands, and don’t get food poisoning. So far, so good, as far as edibility goes?

Disclaimer: I’m not a microbiologist. This experiment isn’t set up to look for specific food-poisoning pathogens (in fact it’s designed to avoid growing them for safety reasons), but it should pick up any large growth of generic bacteria, along with the usual collection of spores, moulds and fungus…

Don’t try this at home unless you want to suffer any gastric consequences.

Fandabi Bannocks: How long will Scottish-style survival rations be good to eat?

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This is all based around an excellent video by Fandabi Dosi, aka Tom Langhorne, who specialises in actually living the survival techniques and equipment of Scotland in the 16th Century or so. Multiple uses of the plaid (“the great kilt”), starting fires in a notoriously wet country, that sort of thing.

This particular video is about his take on a Highland survival food. He comes up with his own recipe, which as far as I’m aware doesn’t actually exist historically, but it could well have done, or at least a close variant.

So I tried it…and yeah, it pretty much works as advertised. It isn’t, as he points out, going to win any baking awards, but it’s calorifically dense (my sums say about 1,000 calories a biscuit, so three biscuits a day is a reasonable claim), and they’re definitely edible. More than that, they are one of these foods that feel calorie dense when you’re eating them, if I was massively hungry in the hills this would be a very welcome snack. Not as good as firing the stove up and cooking something substantial, but easily enough to fill me up a bit.

But about that shelf life claim – how long will these things stay edible without refrigeration? Given the ingredients I’m willing to bet on months, and wouldn’t be surprised if it was into the years. Not necessarily “best before”, I can imagine they’ll continue to dry out and may get a little more challenging to eat, maybe needing a soak in water first, as with hard tack / ship’s biscuit, but I’m looking more at the bacterial side: will they be safe to eat, rather than pleasant.

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So I cooked some up, have them stored in a cool (not refrigerated) dry place, wrapped in greaseproof paper tied with string (the modern equivalent of Tom’s beeswax impregnated cloth), and I’m going to take a bacterial swab every six months, both from the surface and from the inside of a broken open biscuit, and I’ll see what I can get to grow on an agar plate.

Note for the microbiologists: this isn’t entirely rigorous. I’ll be using standard nutrient agar in aerobic conditions, because that’s the limit of my training and the kit I have access to.

Note for the non-microbiologists: the stuff I’ll be using to grow any bacteria I find is not set up to favour stuff that is particularly harmful to humans, specifically anaerobic food poisoning stuff like botulism. This is entirely on purpose, I’m not trained to mess with stuff like that.

What I’ll be looking at is whether bacteria grow on them more generally. I’ll also be able to pick up moulds and fungi etc, which may or may not be harmful if eaten. See, for example, the blue mould found in many cheeses, and is entirely harmless. Or ergot, a fungus that grows in rye and has similar effects to LSD, but in a far more unpleasant way.