Category Archives: Fandabi Bannocks

Three bannocks, round bread-like discs about 10cm in diameter, dotted with raising. They're sitting on greaseproof paper with a fork for scale.

Fandabi Bannocks – The “Several Years” Claim

It’s been a while – about two years since my last post, but that’s quite handy, as it’s a good point to revisit the Fandabi Bannock experiment. For those unfamiliar, Tom Langhorne, AKA Fandabi Dozi,, who does ~17th Century Scottish survival videos and the like, came up with his own attempt at a survival ration that would keep you going through long days in the hills, survive a long time in storage, and be at least reasonably palatable.

See my previous post for the details, but a brief summary: I made some, they’re not the most delicious thing ever, but perfectly edible, and definitely fill you up. Then I took a few, tied them up in greaseproof paper, and left them on a shelf in my home workshop. Unrefrigerated. For two years. I’ll let Tom explain a the end of his video.

So long story short, are they still edible? I’m not eating them, I’m not that committed, but I do have access to petri dishes and nutrient agar for growing microbes.

First, a few microbiology notes: the setup I’m using specifically avoids growing most human pathogens, including most of the main culprits in food poisoning. Not taking that risk in my own home, not trained to that level anyway. But it does allow us to get a rough idea of how hospitable the bannocks are to other microorganisms.

Unwrapping the bannocks there was no obvious sign on mould or bacterial growth. Nothing visual, no smell, nothing had gone soggy, squishy or otherwise icky. And they were still solid enough to use as a defensive projectile at a push.

Three bannocks, round bread-like discs about 10cm in diameter, dotted with raising. They're sitting on greaseproof paper with a fork for scale.
Fork for scale.

I picked one at random and used a sterile cotton bud dipped in sterile water to sample a few points on the exterior. Then I snapped it in half an took a few samples from the inside in the same way. Each was used to inoculate one half of a petri dish containing a standard nutrient agar.

When we do this kind of “environmental sampling” with high school students, testing light switches and phones and the like, we normally incubate the dishes for 48-72 hours and get decent, often very funky results. This though? Almost nothing. I left it a full 5 days just to get a reasonably clear photo.

A petri dish split in two vertically, the left marked "C" is basically clear, the right marked "S" has fuzzy black stuff on it that looks a bit like fingerprints.

This is the exterior sample (control left, sample right). I’m pretty sure the black stuff is some sort of mould. Not a particularly heavy growth from the length of time it incubated for though.

This is the interior. Basically nothing. A tiny patch of what appears to be the same mould as the exterior, and moulds do tend to like getting their little tendrils all up in stuff.

So the obvious question: would I eat it? At the moment, no, because I’m on holiday and would like to enjoy it without getting the squits from an experiment I’m not being paid for!

But more generally, if I was out in the hills and knackered and 24 hours from anywhere, probably. It’s mostly dry carbs and solid fat, plus some dried fruit sugars, there’s very little that a harmful microbe is going to get excited about. They’ve been stored aerobically (i.e. oxygen can get in) which tends to inhibit some of the nastier ones like botulism. Moulds and fungus can still mess up your day (see ergot for example, common on rye in damp conditions, and having an effect like an unpleasant version of LSD), so I’m not saying this is safe by any means…but it’s not obviously dodgy from this very limited bit of microbiology.

You’d definitely be at greater risk if you licked a random mobile phone all over.

[POSTSCRIPT: Oddly, a few minutes after posting this, I glanced at my YouTube feed to find a short on just how much ergot can mess you up. That’s not what I found, but it’s a salutory lesson to never trust a fungus unless you’re sure.]

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.